Janus

by Arthur Koestler

  Finally some additional facts about the autonomic nervous system are pertinent to our theme. In strongly emotional or pathological conditions, the mutually antagonistic, i.e., equilibrating action of the two divisions (sympathetic and parasympathetic) no longer prevails; instead they may mutually reinforce each other, as in the sexual act; or over-excitation of one division may lead to a temporary rebound or over-compensatory 'answering effect' by the other [2]; lastly, the parasympathetic may act as a catalyst that triggers its antagonist into action.* [3]

  * See Appendix III.

  The first of these three possibilities is relevant to our emotional state in listening to a Wagner opera, where relaxed, cathartic feelings seem to be paradoxically combined with euphoric arousal. The second possibility is reflected in 'emotional hangovers' of one kind or another. The third possibility is the most relevant to our theme: it shows in concrete physiological terms how one type of emotional reaction can act as a catalyst for its opposite -- as self-transcending identification with the hero on the screen releases vicarious aggressiveness against the villain; as identification with a group or creed releases the savagery of mob-behaviour.

  3

  I have discussed the basic motivation of the creative scientist: the exploratory drive. Yet every great artist also has an element of the explorer in him: the poet does not 'manipulate words' (as the behaviourists would have it), he explores the emotive and descriptive potentialities of language; the painter is engaged, throughout his life, in learning to see (and in teaching others to see the world the way he does). Thus the creative drive has its unitary biological source, but it can be canalized into a variety of directions.

  This is the first point to retain, if we wish to overcome the deplorable split into the 'two cultures' -- unknown to the Renaissance as it was to antiquity -- and to reaffirm the continuity between the panels of the triptych. Needless to say, continuity does not mean uniformity; it means the gradual shading, without breaks or dividing lines, of one colour of the rainbow into another.

  The horizontal lines across die triptych of creativity are meant to indicate the continuity of some typical combinatorial patterns -- some basic bisociative processes which are found in all three panels. These patterns are trivalent -- they can enter the service of humour, discovery or art. Let me illustrate this by a few more examples, in addition to those already mentioned earlier.

  We have seen, for example, that the caricaturists' cartoon, the scientist's diagram, and the artist's portrait employ the same bisociative technique of superimposing selective grids on the optical appearance. Yet in the language of behaviourist psychology we would have to say that Cézanne, glancing at a landscape, receives a 'stimulus', to which he responds by putting a dab of paint on the canvas -- and that is all there is to it. In reality, perceiving the landscape and re-creating it are two activities which take place simultaneously on two different planes, in two different environments. The stimulus comes from a large, three-dimensional environment, the distant landscape. The response acts on a different environment, a small rectangular canvas. The two are governed by different rules of organization: an isolated brush-stroke on the canvas does not represent an isolated detail in the landscape. There is no point-to-point correspondence between the two planes; they are bisociated as wholes in the artist's creation and in the beholder's eye.

  The creation of a work of art involves a series of processes which happen virtually all at the same time and cannot be rendered in verbal terms without suffering impoverishment and distortion. The artist, as the scientist, is engaged in projecting his vision of reality into a particular medium, whether the medium is paint, marble, or words, or mathematical equations. But the product of his efforts can never be an exact representation or copy of reality, even if he naively hopes to achieve one. In the first place, he has to come to terms with the peculiarities and limitations of his chosen medium. But in the second place, his own perception and world-view also have their own peculiarities and limitations imposed by the implicit conventions of his period or school and by his individual temperament. These lend coherence to his vision, but also tend to freeze into fixed formulae, stereotypes, verbal and visual clichés. The originality of genius, in art as in science, consists in a shift of attention to aspects of reality previously ignored, discovering hidden connections, seeing familiar objects or events in a new light.

  In the discussion which followed a lecture at an American university on the theme of the present chapter, one of the 'resident painters' remarked angrily: 'I do not "bisociate". I sit down, look at the model and paint it.'

  In a sense he was right. He had found his 'style', his visual vocabulary, some years earlier and was content to use it, with minor variations, to express everything he had to say. The erstwhile creative process had become stabilized into a skilled routine. It would be foolish to underestimate the achievements of which skilled routine is capable, whether in the chemical laboratory or in the painter's studio. But technical virtuosity is one thing, creative originality another; and we are only concerned here with the latter.

  4

  The trinity of caricature -- diagram -- stylized portrait provides one of the horizontal connecting lines across the three panels of the triptych. Some other such trivalent patterns have already been mentioned earlier. Thus the bisociation of sound and meaning in its humblest form yields the pun. Yet the rhyme is nothing but a glorified pun, where sound lends resonance to meaning; while for the anthropologist and linguist, sound provides effective clues to meaning. Likewise, when rhythm and metre invade meaning, they may produce a Shakespeare sonnet or a limerick; while in the central panel the study of rhythmic pulsations plays a vital role, from alpha waves to systole and diastole -- the iambi and trochee of life. No wonder that metric verse carries echoes of the shaman's tom-tom and, to quote Yeats, 'lulls the mind into a waking trance'.

  The triune character of other bisociative combinations appears almost over-obvious once one has realized the underlying principle and perceives the three domains of creativity as a continuum. Thus the tracing of hidden analogies yields the poetic metaphor, scientific discovery or comic simile, according to the explorer's motivation. The dichotomies of mind and matter, of spiritual being and/or hairless ape, yield endless variations for scientific, artistic or comic treatment.

  Less obvious is the trivalent role of illusion. The actor or impersonator on the stage is two people at the same time. If the result is degrading -- Hamlet getting the hiccups in the middle of his monologue -- illusion is debunked and the spectator will laugh. If he is led to identify with the hero, he will experience the particular state of split-mindedness known as the magic of the stage. But beside the parodist and the actor there is a third type of impersonator who purposefully employs the human faculty of being oneself and someone else at the same time: the therapist or healer, who projects himself into the patient's mind and at the same time acts as a wise magician or father-figure. Empathy -- Einfühlung -- is a nice, sober term for the rather mysterious process of entering into a kind of mental symbiosis with other selves, of stepping out of one's skin, as it were, and putting oneself into the skin of the other. Empathy is the source of our intuitive understanding -- more direct than language -- of how the other thinks and feels; it is the starting-point of the science and art of medical diagnosis and psychiatry. The medicine man, ancient and modern, has a two-way relationship with the patient: he is trying to feel what the patient feels, and at the same time he is acting the part of one endowed with divine guidance, magic powers, secret knowledge. The tragedian creates illusion; the comedian debunks illusion; the therapist uses it for a definite purpose.

  Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which -- miraculously it seems -- merge into a significant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into an acoustic knot; in the coincide
ntal happening two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.

  Moreover, coincidence may serve as a classic example of the trivalence of bisociative patterns, as it is conspicuously represented on each of the three panels. It is the mainstay of the type of comedy, or farce, which relies on ambiguous situations created by the intersection of two independent series of events so that the situation can be interpreted -- and misinterpreted -- in the light of either one or the other, resulting in mistaken identity or confusion of time and occasion. In the classic tragedy apparent chance -- coincidences are the deus ex machina by which the gods interfere in the destiny of man -- Oedipus is trapped into murdering his father and marrying his mother by mistaken identity. Lastly, lucky hazards -- the gifts of serendipity -- play a conspicuous part in the history of scientific discoveries.

  On a higher level of the triptych, however, the pattern undergoes a subtle change. The comedy of situations yields to the comedy of manners, which no longer relies for its effects on coincidence, but on the clash of incompatible codes of reasoning or conduct, as a result of which the hypocrisy or absurdity of one or both rule-books is exploded. Modern drama shows a similar change; destiny no longer acts from the outside, but from inside the personae; they are no longer marionettes on strings, manipulated by the gods, but victims of their own foolish and conflicting passions: 'the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves'.

  Drama thrives on conflict, and so does the novel. The nature of the conflict may be explicitly stated or merely implied; but an element of it must be present, otherwise the characters would be gliding though a frictionless universe. The conflict may be fought out in the divided heart of a single character; or between two or more persons; or between man and his fate. Conflict between personalities may be due to a contrast in ideas or temperaments, systems of values or codes of conduct -- as in the comedy. But while in the comedy the collision results in malicious debunking, conflict can attain the dignity of tragedy, if the audience is led to accept the attitudes of both antagonists as valid, each within its own frame of reference. If the author succeeds in this, the conflict will be projected into the spectator's -- or reader's -- mind and experienced as a clash between two simultaneous and incompatible identifications. 'We make out of our quarrels with others rhetoric, but out of our quarrels with ourselves poetry,' wrote Yeats. The comedian makes us laugh at the expense of the victim; the tragedian makes us suffer as his accomplice; the former appeals to the self-assertive, the latter to the self-transcending emotions. In between the two, in the emotionally 'neutral' zone, the psychologist, anthropologist and sociologist are engaged in resolving the conflicts by analysing the factors which gave rise to it.

  5

  One basic bisociation remains to be briefly discussed: the confrontation between the tragic and the trivial.

  With due respect to Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage', one might say that the ordinary mortal's life is played on two alternating stages, situated on two different levels -- let us call them the trivial plane and the tragic plane of existence. Most of the time we bustle about on the trivial plane; but on some special occasions, when confronted with death or engulfed in the oceanic feeling, we seem to fall through a stage-trap or man-hole and are transferred to the tragic or absolute plane. Then all at once our daily routines appear as shallow, trifling vanities. But once safely back on the trivial plane we dismiss the experiences of the other as phantasms of overstrung nerves.

  The highest form of human creativity is the endeavour to bridge the gap between the two planes. Both the artist and the scientist are gifted -- or cursed -- with the faculty of perceiving the trivial events of everyday experience sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity; and conversely to express the absolute in human terms, to reflect it in a concrete image. Our ordinary mortal has neither the intellectual nor the emotional equipment to live for more than brief transition periods on the tragic plane. The Infinite is too inhuman and elusive to cope with unless it is made to blend itself with the tangible world of the finite. The existentialist's Absolute becomes emotionally effective only if it is bisociated with something concrete -- dovetailed into the familiar. This is what both scientist and artist are aiming at, though not always consciously. By bridging the gap between the two planes, the cosmic mystery becomes humanized, drawn into the orbit of man, while his humdrum experiences are transformed, surrounded by a halo of mystery and wonder.

  Needless to say, not all novels are 'problem novels', subjecting the reader to a sustained barrage of existential conundrums. But indirectly and implicitly every great work of art has some bearing on man's ultimate problems. Even a humble daisy has a root, and a work of art, however lighthearted or serene, is ultimately nourished through its delicate capillaries by the archetypal sub-strata of experience.

  By living on both planes at once, the creative artist ot scientist is able to catch an occasional glimpse of eternity looking through the window of time. Whether it is a mediaeval stained-glass window or Newton's formula of universal gravity, is a matter of temperament and taste.

  6

  In the previous sections I discussed the continuity of the domains of humour, discovery and art; the emotional climate in each of the three domains and its derivation from the basic polarity of emotions; lastly the 'horizontal lines' across the triptych-model, indicating the structural affinities between the bisociative patterns of creative activity in the three domains. We must now have a closer look at the psychology of the creative act itself.

  All coherent thinking and acting is governed by 'rules of the game', although we are mostly unaware of being controlled by them. In the artificial conditions of the psychological laboratory the rules are explicitly spelt out by the experimenter; for instance: 'name opposites'. Then the experimenter says 'dark' and the subject promptly answers 'light'. But if the rule is 'synonyms', the subject will respond with 'black' or 'night' or 'shadow'. Note that though the rule is fixed, it leaves the subject a choice of several answers, even in this simple game. To talk, as behaviourists do, of stimuli and responses forming a chain in a vacuum is meaningless: what response a particular stimulus will evoke depends (a) on the fixed rules of the game and (b) on the flexible strategies which the rules permit, guided by past experience, temperament and other factors.

  But the games we play in everyday life are more complex than those in the laboratory, where the rules are laid down by explicit order. In the normal routines of thinking and talking the rules exercise their control implicitly, from way below the level of conscious awareness. Not only the codes of grammar and syntax operate hidden in the gaps between the words, but also the codes of commonsense logic and of those more complex mental structures which we call 'frames of perception or associative contexts', and which include our built-in, axiomatic prejudices and emotional inclinations. Even if consciously bent on defining the rules which govern our thinking, we find it extremely difficult to do so and have to enlist the help of specialists -- linguists, semanticists, psychiatrists, and so forth. We play the games of life, obeying rule-books written in invisible ink or a secret code. But there are problem-situations where playing the game is not enough, and only creative originality points the way out of the trap.

  In The Act of Creation I proposed the term 'matrix' as a unifying formula to refer to these cognitive structures -- that is, to all mental habits, routines and skills governed by an invariant code (which may be explicit or implicit), but capable of varied strategies in attacking a problem or task. In other words, 'matrices' are mental holons and display all the characteristics of holons discussed in previous chapters. They are controlled by canonical rules, but guided by feedbacks from the outer and inner environment; they range from pedantic rigidity to flexible adaptability -- within the limits permitted by the code; they are ordered into 'vertical', abstractive hierarchies which interlace in 'horizontal' associative networks and cross-references (cf. 'arborization and reticulation', Chapter I).

  When life con
fronts us with a problem or task, it will be dealt with according to the same set of rules which enabled us to deal with similar situations in our past experience. It would be foolish to belittle the value of such law-abiding routines. They lend coherence and stability to behaviour, and structured order to reasoning. But when the difficulty or novelty of the task exceeds a critical limit, these routines are no longer adequate to cope with it. The world is on the move, and new situations arise, posing questions and offering challenges which cannot be met within the conventional frames of reference, the established rule-books. In science, such situations arise under the impact of new data which shake the foundations of well-established theories. The challenge is often self-imposed by the insatiable exploratory drive, which prompts the original mind to ask questions which nobody has asked before and to feel frustrated by dusty answers. In the artist's case, the challenge is a more or less permanent one, arising out of the limitations of his medium of expression, his urge to escape from the constraints and distortions imposed by the conventional styles and techniques of his time, his ever-hopeful struggle to express the inexpressible.