The Act of Creation

by Arthur Koestler

  Always bearing these qualifications in mind, we might spin out the metaphor: if the great confluence towards which science strives is the universal logos, the ultimate spring of aesthetic experience is the archetypos. The literal meaning of the word is 'implanted' (typos = stamp) 'from the beginning'. Jung described archetypes as 'the psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type' encountered by our ancestors, and stamped into the memory of the race -- it is, into the deep layers of the 'collective unconcious' below the level of personal memories. Hence, whenever some archetypal motif is sounded, the response is much stronger than warranted by its face value -- the mind responds like a tuning fork to a pure tone.

  One need not be a follower of Jung to recognize the same archetypal experiences crystallized into symbols in the mythologies of cultures widely separate in space and time. Examples of such recurrent patterns are the death-and-resurrection motif; the extension of the sexual duality into the metaphysical polarities of masculine logic and feminine intuition, mother earth and heavenly father, etc.; the strife between generations -- and its counterpoint, the taboo on incest; the Promethean struggle to wrest power from the gods -- and the imperative need to placate them by sacrifice; the urge to penetrate to the ultimate mystery -- and the resigned admission that reality is beyond the mind's grasp, hidden by the veil of Maya, reduced to shadows in Plato's cave. These perennial patterns of victory and defeat recur in ever-changing variations throughout the ages, because they derive from the very essence of the human condition -- its paradoxes and predicaments. They play an all-important part in literature, from Greek tragedy down to the present, permeating both the whole and the part: the plot, and the images employed in it. The poetic image attains its highest vibrational intensity as it were, when it strikes archetypal chords -- when eternity looks through the window of time.

  William Empson [3] has given a convincing analysis of the archetypal imagery in Nash's famous lines -- which, however often quoted, never lose their power:

  Brightness falls from the air. Queens have died young and fair. Dust hath closed Helen's eye. I am sick, I must die. Lord have mercy upon us.

  'If death did not exist', wrote Schopenhauer, 'there would be no philosophy -- nor would there be poetry.' That does not mean that either philosophy, or art, must be obsessively preoccupied with death; merely, that great works of art are always transparent to some dim outline of the ultimate experience, the archetypal image. It need not have a tragic shape, and it may be no more than the indirect reflection of a reflection, the echo of an echo. But metaphor and imagery yield aesthetic value only if the two contexts which are involved in the comparison form an ascending gradient -- if one of them is felt to be nearer to the source of the stream. Mutatis mutandum, a scientific theory need not be directly concerned with the ultimate secret of the universe, but it must point towards it by bringing order and harmony into some obscure corner. To clinch the argument, I must quote once more Housman's essay on The Name and Nature of Poetry:

  In these six simple words of Milton -- Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more -- what is it that can draw tears, as I know it can, to the eyes . . . ? What in the world is there to cry about? Why have the mere words the physical effect of pathos when the sense of the passage is blithe and gay? I can only say, because they are poetry, and find their way to something in man which is obscure and latent, something older than the present organization of his nature, like the patches of fen which still linger here and there in the drained lands of Cambridgeshire.

  Cataloguing Plots

  Let me mention a few exampks of archetypal patterns in literature -- without any attempt at cataloguing Goethe's thirty-six basic plots.

  The Promethean striving for omnipotence and omniscience is symbolized in Jacob's struggle with the angel, the Tower of Babel, the flight of Icarus, the Faustus legend, and so on through Voltaire's Candide, down to the broken Promethean heroes of H. G. Wells (Dr. Moreau) or Dostoyevski (Stavrogin in The Possessed). In the modern development of the theme, it is of course treated in a more allusive, implicit manner; but in the mass media and pulp magazines, Supermen, Space Cadets, and Black Magicians are all happily running true to archetype.

  The next catalogue-heading would be 'Individual against Society', with several subheadings, such as 'from Oedipus to Schmoedipus, or shall we love mamma?' Next would come 'polygonal patterns of libidinous relations' (triangles, quadrangles, etc.); a title I have actually borrowed from a learned publication by a field-anthropologist; it shows that if you collect archetypes methodically, they crumble to dust. Yet under this heading belongs at least half the total bulk of world literature, from the Vulcan-Venus-Mars triangle onward. Next might come the War of the Sexes -- from the Amazon myths through Lysistrata to Ann Veronica and Simone de Beauvoir; next, love triumphant, or defeated -- the Song of Songs alternating with Isolde's Liebestod. Lastly, the Conquest of the Flesh, from the Buddha to Aldous Huxley.

  Still under the heading 'Man and Society' would come the subheadings: the hubris of Power; the hubris of Cleverness; the hubris of the Ivory Tower and, less obvious, the hubris of Sanctity. The last is either an offence to God (Job; the ten righteous men who find less favour than the one repentant sinner) or to society, because the hero's personal scales of value deviate from the conventional. He must therefore either be an inspired fool, or play the fool to escape sanction, or suffer martyrdom -- 'The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!' Examples range from the Perceval legend and The Lay of the Great Fool, through Don Quixote, Eulenspiegel and The Good Soldier Schweik to Prince Mishkin in Dostoyevski's The Idiot, and Camus' L'Étranger.

  Under the heading 'The Divided Heart' would fall, as sub-categories, conflicts between Love and Duty; between Self-Preservation and Self-Sacrifice; between Ends and Means; and between Faith and Reason.

  Puppets and Strings

  To end this pedantic -- and yet very incomplete -- catalogue, I must mention one of the most powerful archetypes, which appears in countless variations in the history of literature: the Puppet on Strings, or Volition against Fate. In Oedipus Rex fate appears in the shape of malevolent powers who trap the King into performing his disastrous deeds apparently out of his own free will. In all plots of the "Appointment in Samara" type, apparent coincidences are the means by which destiny defeats the will of man (cf. coincidence in comedy, p. 78). In Christian theology, the ways of God become less arbitrary, but more inscrutable; man proposes, God disposes; original sin chokes his designs. In the Eastern religions he is tied to the wheel of rebirth; in Islam he carries his fate fastened round his neck. The great theological disputes between Calvinists and Lutherans, Jansenites and Jesuits turned mainly on the question of predestination, or more precisely, on the length of the rope left to man to hang himself.

  With the rise of Natural Philosophy, a change in the character of destiny began to take shape. Romeo and Juliet still die as a result of fatal misunderstandings ('One writ with me in sour misfortune's book'). But in Shakespeare's later works, destiny acts no longer only from outside but also from inside the personae; they are victims not so much of blind fate, but of their blind passions: 'the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves'. These are great, brave words; but they did not solve the dilemma, they merely polished its horns. Divine predestination was transformed into scientific determinism, which left man even less scope than before for exercising his will and making free choices. The hairshirt of the penitent had allowed him some freedom of movement, but the laws of heredity and environment wove a strait-jacket so tight that it became indistinguishable from his living skin. Even the word 'volition' was banned from psychology as empty of meaning. Chromosomes and glandular secretions took over from the gods in deciding a man's fate. He remained a marionette on strings, with the only difference that he was now suspended on the nucleic acid chains determining his heredity, and the conditioned-reflex chains forged by the environment.

  The most explicit adoption of this sc
hema for literary uses is found in the naturalist movement of the nineteenth century. Its programme was formulated in Zola's Le Roman Experimental, inspired by the Introduction à l'étude de la médicine experimentale by the great Claude Bernard (who discovered the vasomotor system of nerves, and the glucose-producing function of the liver). Zola urged his fellow writers to take a 'physiological view' of man as a product of nature devoid of free will and subject to the laws of heredity and environment. Fortunately, in spite of the naturalist vogue in Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia, writers accepted his views in theory only -- as they are wont to do. The creative mind knows how to draw on archetypal symbols without degrading them by misplaced concreteness.

  You can make an X-ray photograph of a face, but you cannot make a face from an X-ray photograph. You can show that underlying the subtle and complex action of a novel there is a primitive skeleton, without committing lèse majesté, or foolishly assuming that the plot makes the novel. There is only a limited number of plots, recurring down the ages, derived from an even more limited number of basic patterns -- the conflicts, paradoxes, and predicaments inherent in man's condition. And if we continue the stripping game, we find that all these paradoxes and predicaments arise from conflicts between incompatible frames of experience or scales of value, illuminated in consciousness by the bisociative act. In this final illumination Aristotle saw 'the highest form of learning' because it shows us that we are 'men, not gods'; and he called tragedy 'the noblest form of literature' because it purges suffering from its pettiness by showing that its causes lie in the inescapable predicaments of existence.*

  NOTES

  To p. 351. Hindu apologists would have us take Krishna's exhortations to belligerence as allegorical references to wars fought inside the human soul. The argument is as far-fetched as the Christian apologists' attempts to represent the Song of Songs as an allegory of Christ's love for His Church.

  To p. 352. Eric Newton (An Introduction to European Painting) actually uses the same metaphor.

  To p. 357. At least this seems the most plausible explanation of the cryptic remark in the Poetics that we take pleasure in tragedy because learning is pleasurable, and tragedy involves learning.

  XX

  THE BELLY OF THE WHALE

  The Night Journey

  One archetype remains to be discussed, which is of special significance for the act of creation. It is variously known as the Night Journey, or the Death-and-Rebirth motif; but one might as well call it the meeting of the Tragic and the Trivial Planes. It appears in countless guises; its basic pattern can be roughly described as follows. Under the effect of some overwhelming experience, the hero is made to realize the shallowness of his life, the futility and frivolity of the daily pursuits of man in the trivial routines of existence. This realization may come to him as a sudden shock caused by some catastrophic event, or as the cumulative effect of a slow inner development, or through the trigger action of some apparently banal experience which assumes an unexpected significance. The hero then suffers a crisis which involves the very foundations of his being; he embarks on the Night Journey, is suddenly transferred to the Tragic Plane -- from which he emerges purified, enriched by new insight, regenerated on a higher level of integration.

  The symbolic expressions of this pattern are as old as humanity. [1] The crisis or Night Journey may take the form of a visit to the underworld (Orpheus, Odysseus); or the hero is cast to the bottom of a well (Joseph), buried in a grave (Jesus), swallowed by a fish (Jonah); or he retires alone into the desert, as Buddha, Mahomet, Christ, and other prophets and founders of religions did at the crucial turn in their lives.

  I went down to the bottoms of the mountains: the earth with her bars was about me for ever.

  The journey always represents a plunge downward and backward to the sources and tragic undercurrents of existence, into the fluid magma, of which the Trivial Plane of everyday life is merely the thin crust. In most tribal societies, the plunge is symbolically enacted in the initiation-rites which precede the turning points in the life of the individual, such as puberty or marriage. He is made to undertake a minor Night Journey: segregated from the community, he must fast, endure physical hardships and various ordeals, so that he may experience the essential solitude of man, and establish contact with the Tragic Plane. A similar purpose is served by the symbolic drowning and rebirth of baptism; the institution of periods of retreat found in most religious; in fasts and other purification rituals; in the initiation ceremonies of religious or masonic orders, even of university societies. Illumination must be preceded by the ordeals of incubation.

  Freudians and Jungians alike emphasize the intimate relation between the symbolism of the Night Journey, and the unconscious craving for a return to the womb. The connection is no more far-fetched than our references to 'mother earth', 'mother ocean', or 'mother church'.

  Not only do we speak of'Mother Church', but even of the 'womb of the Church', and in the ceremony of the 'benedictio fontis' of the Catholic Church the baptismal font is even called the 'immaculatus divini fontis uterus' (the immaculate uterine font of divinity). . . . [2]

  The maternal aspect of the church is impersonated in the Virgin Mary. In Donne's 'Annunciation', the Angel greets her with:

  That All, which alwayes is All every where, Which cannot sinne, and yet all sinnes must beare, Which cannot die, yet cannot chuse but die, Loe, faithfull Virgin, yeelds himselfe to lye In prison, in thy wombe; . . . . . . yea thou art now Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother; Thou 'hast light in darke; and shutst in little roome, Immensity cloystered in thy deare wombe.

  The craving for the womb, for the dissolution of the self in a lost, vegetative oneness -- Freud's Nirvana principle -- is further symbolized in the image of mother ocean in whose calm depths all life originates. Mythology is full of these symbols -- the metaphors of the collective unconscious. However bewildering they may appear to the waking mind, they are familiar to the dreamer, and recur constantly in the sleep of people who have nothing else in common. The Night Journey is the antipode of Promethean striving. One endeavours to steal the bright fire from the gods; the other is a sliding back towards the pulsating darkness, one and undivided, of which we were part before our separate egos were formed.

  Thus the Night Journey is a regression of the participatory tendencies, a crisis in which consciousness becomes unborn -- to become reborn in a higher form of synthesis. It is once more the process of reculer pour mieux sauter; the creative impulse, having lost its bearing in trivial entanglements, must effect a retreat to recover its vigour.

  Without our regular, minor night journeys in sleep we would soon become victims of mental desiccation. Dreaming is for the aesthetically underprivileged the equivalent of artistic experience, his only means of self-transcendence, of breaking away from the trivial plane and creating his own mythology.

  The Guilt of Jonah

  Among the many variations of the Night Journey in myth and folklore, one of the most forceful is the swry of Jonah and the whale -- perhaps because in no ancient civilization was the tension between the Tragic and Trivial planes more intensely felt than by the Hebrews. The first was represented by the endless succession of invasions and catastrophes, the exacting presence of Jehovah and of his apocalyptic prophets; the second by the rare periods of relatively normal life, which the over-strung spiritual leaders of the tribe condemned as abject. Jonah had committed no crime which would warrant his dreadful punishment; he is described as a quite ordinary and decent fellow with just a streak of normal vanity -- for he is, justifiably, 'very angry' when, in the end, God does not raze Nineveh as Jonah had prophesied at His bidding, and thus makes Jonah appear an impostor or fool.

  Now this very ordinary person receives at the beginning of the story God's sudden order to 'go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it' -- which is a rather tall order, for Jonah is no professional priest or prophet. It is quite understandable that he prefers to go on leading his happy and trivial life. So
, instead of responding to the call from the Tragic Plane, he buys a passage on a ship to Tarshish; and he has such a clean conscience about it, that while the storm rages and the sailors cry 'every man unto his god' and throw the cargo into the sea, Jonah himself is fast asleep. And therein -- in his normality, complacency, in his thick-skinned triviality and refusal to face the storm, and God, and the corruption of Nineveh; in his turning his back on the tragic essence of life -- precisely therein lies his sin, which leads to the crisis, to the Night Journey in the belly of the whale, in 'the belly of hell'.

  The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head . . . yet hast thou brought up my life from corruption, O Lord my God. When my soul fainted within me I remembered the Lord: and my prayer came in unto thee. . . . They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy.

  The story sounds in fact like an allegory of a nervous breakdown and subsequent spiritual conversion. Jonah might serve as a symbol for Dimitri Karamazov, or any of the countless heroes of fiction who progress through crisis to awakening. For I must repeat that Jonah's only crime was to cling to the Trivial Plane and to cultivate his little garden, trying to ignore the uncomfortable, unjust, terrible voice from the other plane. Melville understood this when, in the great sermon in "Moby Dick," he made his preacher sum up the lesson of Jonah and the whale in this unorthodox moral: