The Act of Creation (46 page)

pp. 82-6
;
263
f.) Even the
most naturalistic picture, chronicle, or novel, whose maker naively
hopes to copy reality, contains an unavoidable element of bias, of
selective emphasis. Its direction depends on the distorting lenses in
the artist's mind -- the perceptual and conceptual matrices which pattern
his experience, and determine which aspects of it should be regarded as
relevant, which not. This part-automatic, part-conscious processing of the
experience, over which the medium exercises a kind of 'feed-back-control',
determines to a large extent what we call an artist's individual style.

 

 

Theoretically, the range of choice before him is enormous. In practice,
it is narrowed down considerably by the conventions of his period or
school. They are imposed on him not only by external pressures -- the
public's taste and the critics' censure -- but mainly from inside. The
controls of skilled activities function, as we saw, below the level of
awareness on which that activity takes place -- whether it consists in
riding a bicycle or 'taking in' a landscape. The codes which govern the
matrices of perception are hidden persuaders; their influence permeates
the whole personality, shapes his pattern of vision, determines which
aspects of reality should be considered significant, while others are
ignored, like the ticking of one's watch. For centuries painters did
not seem to have noticed that shadows have colours, nor the fluidity of
contours in hazy air; and if we were to add up those aspects of existence
which literature has ignored at one time or another, they would cover
practically the whole range of human experience. Conversely, every period
over-emphasizes some particular aspects of experience and produces its
special brand of 'stylization' and compulsive mannerisms -- obvious to all
but itself. For instance, the emphasis on contour in classical painting is
still so firmly embedded in our frames of perception that we are unaware
of the impossibility of seeing foreground figure and background landscape
simultaneously in sharp focus. But we are aware of the absence of shadows
in Chinese painting -- or the absence of sex in Victorian fiction.

 

 

The measure of an artist's originality, put into the simplest terms, is
the extent to which his selective emphasis deviates from the conventional
norm and establishes new standards of relevance. All great innovations,
which inaugurate a new era, movement, or school, consist in such sudden
shifts of attention and displacements of emphasis onto some previously
neglected aspect of experience, some blacked-out range of the existential
spectrum. The decisive turning points in the history of every art-form
are discoveries which show the characteristic features already discussed:
they uncover what has always been there; they are 'revolutionary', that
is, destructive and constructive; they compel us to revalue our values
and impose a new set of rules on the eternal game.

 

 

Most of the general considerations in the chapter on 'The Evolution of
Ideas' equally apply to the evolution of art. In both fields the truly
original geniuses are rare compared with the enormous number of talented
pnctitioners; the former acting as spearheads, opening up new territories,
which the latter will then diligently cultivate. In both fields there
are periods of crisis, of 'creative anarchy', leading to a break-through
to new frontiers -- followed by decades, or centuries of consolidation,
orthodoxy, stagnation, and decadence -- until a new crisis arises, a holy
discontent, which starts the cycle again. Other parallels could be drawn:
'multiple discoveries' -- the simultaneous emergence of a new style,
for which the time is ripe, independently in several places; 'collective
discoveries' originating in a closely knit group, clique, school, or team;
'rediscoveries' -- the periodic revivals of past and forgotten forms of
art; lastly 'cross-fertilizations' between seemingly distant provinces
of science and art. To quote a single example: the rediscovery of the
treatise on conic sections by Apollonius of Perga, dating from the fourth
century B.C., gave the ellipse to Kepler who built on it a new astronomy
-- and to Guarini, who introduced new vistas into architecture.

 

 

 

Economy

 

 

Yesterday's discoveries are today's commonplaces; a daringly fresh image
soon becomes stale by repetition, degenerates into a cliché,
and loses its emotive appeal. The newborn day or the piercing cry are
no longer even perceived as metaphorical: the once separate contexts of
birth and dawn have merged, there is no juxtaposition -- reverting to
jargon, bisociative dynamism has been converted into associative routine.

 

 

The recurrent cycles of stagnation, crisis, and new departure in the
arts are to a large extent caused by the gradual saturation which any
particular invention or technique produces in artist and audience. A
child or a savage, who is taken to the cinema for the first time, derives
wonder and delight not so much from the context of the film as from the
magic of illusion as such. In the sophisticated theatre-goer's mind,
illusion in itself plays a relatively subordinate part -- except when,
watching a thriller, he regresses to infancy; the two matrices have
become virtually integrated into one, so that he is capable of thinking
critically of the quality of the acting and of appreciating at the same
time the merits of the play. But to recapture the erstwhile magic, in
all its freshness, he must turn to something new: experimental theatre,
avant-garde films, or Japanese Kabuki, perhaps; novel experiences which
compel him to strain his imagination, in order to make sense of the
seemingly absurd -- to participate, and re-create.

 

 

When the styles and techniques of an art have become conventionalized
and stagnant, the audience is exempted from the necessity to exert its
intelligence and imagination -- and deprived of its reward. The 'consumer'
reads the conventional novel, looks at the conventional landscape, and
watches the conventional play with perfect ease and self-assurance --
and a complete absence of awe and wonder. He prefers the familiar to the
unfamiliar, because it presents no challenge and demands no creative
effort. Art becomes a mildly pleasant pastime and loses its emotive
impact, its transcendental appeal and cathartic effect. The artist, in
growing frustration, senses that the conventional techniques have become
'stale', that they have lost their power over the audience, and become
inadequate as means of communication and self-expression. Of course the
technique itself cannot become 'stale': blank verse has the same rhythmic
qualities today as it had three centuries ago; Fragonard's nymphs and
shepherds are as delightful as ever, but they dance no more. We have
become immunized against their emotional appeal -- at least for the
time being. We may again become susceptible to them at the next romantic
revival, at some future turn of the spiral.

 

 

The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle
against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation. The way out of the
cul-de-sac is either a revolutionary departure towards new horizons, or
the rediscovery of past techniques, or a combination of both. (Egyptian
art went through a revival of archaic styles under the twenty-sixth
dynasty, in the seventh century B.C.; Rome had a Renaissance of sorts in
the second century A.D. when Hadrian built his Athenaeum; and so on to the
pre-Raphaelites and the relatively recent rediscovery of primitive art.)

 

 

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