Janus: A Summing Up

by Arthur Koestler

  VIII

  THE DISCOVERIES OF ART

  1

  Laughing and weeping, aroused by comedy and tragedy, mark the two extremes of a continuous spectrum. Both provide channels for the overflow of emotions; both are 'luxury reflexes' without apparent utility. This much they have in common; in every other respect they are direct opposites.

  Although weeping is neither an uncommon nor a trivial phenomenon, academic psychology has almost totally ignored it. There are no theories of weeping comparable to Bergson's or Freud's treatises on laughter; and the theory put forward in The Act of Creation is the only one mentioned in Hilgard and Atkinson's standard textbook of psychology for American college students.*

  * From Hilgard and Atkinson, Introduction to Psychology (4th ed., 1967), Ch. 7 'Emotion', sub-section 'Weeping': 'Laughter and tears are often close together, and although we associate laughter with joy and tears with sadness, there are also tears of joy. The writer Arthur Koestler has noted the failure in text-books of psychology to treat weeping, and he has attempted to supply this lack by an analysis of his own. He notes five kinds of situations in which weeping accompanies motivated behaviour.' The text-book then briefly mentions five such situations -- raptness, mourning, relief, sympathy, self-pity -- and concludes: 'These illustrations show how emotions provide a kind of commentary on ongoing motivated behaviour. The weeping is neither a drive nor an incentive, but it is a sign that something motivationally important is occurring.' And that's all that students of psychology are taught about weeping.

  As a preliminary step, we must make a distinction between weeping and crying: it is a peculiarity of the English language to treat them as synonymous. Weeping has two basic reflex characteristics: the secretion of tears and a specific way of breathing. Crying is the emission of sounds signalling distress or protest. It may be combined with or alternate with weeping, but should not be confused with it. Crying is a form of communication, weeping is a private affair. And we are talking, of course, of spontaneous weeping, not of the contrived sobs of stagecraft, public or private.

  Let us compare the physiological processes involved in laughter and weeping. Laughter is triggered by the adrenal-sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, weeping by the para-sympathetic branch. The first, as we have seen, serves to energize the body, tensing it for action; the second has the opposite effect: it lowers blood pressure, neutralizes excesses of blood-sugar, facilitates the elimination of body-waste and generally tends towards quietude and catharsis -- literally the 'purging' of tensions.

  This physiological contrast is clearly reflected in the visible manifestations of laughter and weeping. The laugher's eyes sparkle, the corners are wrinkled, but brow and cheeks are taut and smooth, which lends the face an expression of radiance; the lips are parted, the corners lifted. In weeping, the eyes are 'blinded by tears', they lose their focus and lustre; the features seem to crumble; even when weeping for joy or in aesthetic rapture, the transfigured face reflects a serene languidness.

  A similar contrast is noticeable in bodily postures and motions. In laughter the head is thrown back by a vigorous contraction of the muscles in the neck; the person who weeps 'lets the head droop' (into the hands, on the table or on somebody's shoulder). Laughter contracts the muscles and begets agitated movements; in weeping the muscles go flabby, the shoulders slump forward, the whole posture reflects a 'letting go'.

  The pattern of respiration in laughter consists of long, deep intakes of air, followed by bursts of explosive exhalatory puffs -- ha-ha-ha! In weeping the process is reversed: short, gasping inhalations -- sobs -- are followed by long, sighing exhalations -- a-a-h, ah. . . .

  These manifest contrasts between laughter and weeping, and their dependence on two different branches of the autonomic nervous system, are in keeping with their origin in opposite types of emotion. The Haha reaction is triggered by the self-assertive, the Ah . . . reaction by the self-transcending emotions. The first half of this statement should by now be obvious, the second requires some further comment.

  2

  In The Act of Creation I discussed in detail various situations which may lead to an overflow of tears -- mourning, pity, helplessness, awe, religious or aesthetic rapture, etc. Only the last is directly relevant to our subject, but it is worth noting that all eye-moistening emotions have a basic element in common which is altruistic, i.e., self-transcending -- a longing to enter into a quasi-symbiotic communion with a person, living or dead, or some higher entity which may be Nature, or a form of Art, or a mystic experience. These 'participatory' emotions are, as we have seen, subjective manifestations of the integrative tendency, reflecting the human holon's partness -- its dependence on, and commitment to, some more comprehensive unit on a higher level of the hierarchy which transcends the narrow confines of the self. Listening to the organist playing in an empty cathedral, or looking at the stars on a summer night, may cause a welling-up of emotions which moisten the eyes, accompanied by an expansion of consciousness, which becomes quasi-depersonalized and -- if the experience is very intense -- leads into 'the oceanic feeling of limitless extension and oneness with the universe'* -- the Ah . . . reaction in its purest form.

  * Romain Rolland describing the character of religious experience in a letter to Freud -- who regretfully professed never to have felt anything of the sort. [1]

  Ordinary mortals rarely ascend to such mystic heights, but they are at least familiar with the foothills. The self-transcending emotions have an extensive scale of intensity and a wide range of variety; they may be joyous or sad, tragic or lyrical. 'Weeping for joy' and 'weeping in sorrow' reflect the relative nature of the hedonic tone superimposed on all emotions.

  A further contrast between the Haha and the Ah . . . reactions is worth underlining. In laughter, we saw, tension is suddenly exploded; in weeping it is gradually drained away, without debunking expectation, without breaking the continuity of mood; in the Ah . . . reaction emotion and reason remain united. Moreover, the self-transcending emotions do not tend towards bodily action, but towards passive quiescence. Respiration and pulse are slowed down; 'entrancement' is a step towards the trance-like states induced by contemplative mystics; the emotion is of a quality that cannot be consummated by any specific voluntary act. To be 'overwhelmed' by awe and wonder, 'enraptured' by a smile, 'entranced' by beauty -- each of these words expresses passive surrender. The surplus of emotion cannot be worked off by any purposeful muscular activity, it can only be consummated in internal -- visceral and glandular -- processes (cf. above, Chapter III).

  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 potentiali
ties 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 coincidental 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 thr
ives 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