The Act of Creation (42 page)

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.

 

 

This is true even on the elementary levels of perception. We are
more susceptible to musical tones than to noises, because the former
consist of periodical, the latter of a-periodical air-waves. Similar
considerations apply to pure colours; or to the symmetry and balance which
lend a design its 'unity in diversity'. Plato decreed that all heavenly
motions must take place in perfect circles at uniform speed, because only
such regular periodicity could assure the steady, eternal pulsations of
the universe. Perhaps the compulsive pattern-walking ritual of certain
neurotics, who must always step into the centre of pavement-stones,
is motivated by the same unconscious craving for order and regularity
as a protection against the anxiety-arousing threat of change.

 

 

 

Measure and Meaning

 

 

'The superimposition of two systems: thought and metre,' wrote Proust, 'is
a primary element of ordered complexity, that is to say, of beauty.' [2]
But this superimposition -- in our jargon, the bisociation of rhythm and
meaning -- is again trivalent: it can be put to poetic, scientific, or
comic use. When rhythm assumes a rigidly repetitive form, it no longer
recalls the pulsation of life, but the motions of an automaton; its
superimposition on human behaviour is degrading, and yields Bergson's
formula of the comic: the mechanical encrusted on the living. But here
again, all depends on one's emotional attitude: prewar films of German
soldiers marching the goose-step -- or if it comes to that, the changing
of the Guard at Buckingham Palace -- will strike one spectator as comic,
and appeal to the tribal, or romantic, emotions of another. Once one is
in a marching column, it is extremely difficult to keep out of step; one
has become patterned by the rhythmic motion in which one participates. But
the comedian as an army recruit falling chronically out of step is comic,
for obvious reasons.

 

 

In the natural sciences, the analysis of rhythmic periodicities --
the numerical patterns underlying the phenomena of naïve experience
-- play a dominant part. The Pythagoreans regarded the universe as
a large musical box, the organism as a well-tempered instrument, and
all material phenomena as a dance of numbers. The metre of the poet,
the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are
all derived from the same root, "metron": measure, measurement. Yet the
quantitative patterns in themselves would be meaningless to us if they
were not accompanied by the sensory qualities of colour, sound, heat,
taste, texture, and so on; and the rhythms of our brain-waves on the
electro-encephalogram would be meaningless if we were not conscious of
thinking. The scientist takes a 'bi-focal' view of life; and so does the
reader whose attention is focussed simultaneously both on the measure
and the message of the poem.

 

 

Without the message, the rhythm is of course meaningless, in poetry as in
science. A monotonous rhythm, for instance, can be either sleepy-making
or exciting, according to the message which it carries. Rhythmic stroking
of the skin may be soothing or sexually exciting -- it depends on the
message. The rhythmic rattle of the wheels on a train journey will lull
one to sleep, as a superior form of counting sheep, if one is in a relaxed
mood; but I can remember at least one ghastly journey, when I found
myself in a predicament of my own making, and the wheels kept repeating,
'I
told
you so, I
told
you so, I
told
you so'
with such haUucinatory clarity and insistence that I found it difficult
to convince myself that the other passengers in the compartment did not
hear it. Rhythm penetrates so deeply into the unconscious strata that it
makes us suggestible even to self-addressed messages -- from the Yogic
recitation of mantras to Coué's 'every day in every way . . . '.

 

 

 

However, unlike the beat of the tom-tom, or the rattle of the carriage
wheels, a strophe of verse does not consist in a simple repetitive rhythm,
but in complex patterns of short and long, stressed and light syllables,
further complicated by super-imposed patterns of assonance or rhyme. As
music has evolved a long way from the simple, repetitive figures of
monochords and drums, so the various metric forms in poetry contain
their substructure of rhythmic pulsation in an
implied
, and no
longer in an explicit form. In free verse, the rhythmic substructure
has become so implicit, as to go sometimes unnoticed.

 

 

This development from the explicit to the implicit, from the direct
statement to the veiled hint, is a phenomenon which we have already
met (
pp 84
ff.), and shall meet again in other
provinces of art, as a characteristic factor in the evolution of creative
techniques in general.

 

 

 

Repetition and Affinity

 

 

The rhyme is a relatively late offspring of rhythm. Both words are
derived from the same Greek root, "rhutmos"; up to the sixteenth century
they were treated as practically synonymous. Metric patterns based
exclusively on the regular succession of ups and downs of intonation --
the only form of verse in Greek and Latin poetry -- were later combined
with patterns based on the repetition of single consonants and vowels;
and thus, via alliteration and assonance, the rhyme came into being --
as melody was born out of originally unmodulated, rhythmic beats.

 

 

But although conscious rhyming was only admitted into formal literature
in the Middle Ages (at first as the internal rhyme in Leonine verse),
it has, like rhythm, its primordial roots in the unconscious. The
repetition
of syllables is a conspicuous phenomenon at the very
origins of language. In the early stages of learning to speak, children
seem to have an irresistible impulse to jabber repetitive variations of
sound patterns -- from ma-ma and pa-pa to obble-gobble, minky-pinky and so
on ad infinitum; gibble-gabble was the Victorian word for it. Similarly,
in many primitive languages as far apart as Polynesian and Bantu, words
like Kala-Kala or Moku-Moku abound; and why does the name Humpty-Dumpty
hold such a charm for child and adult alike?

 

 

Next to repetition,