there is no better book about human creativity

Douglas Fowler, S.J. Perelman. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983, p. 83—

Continuing an ancient and honorable line of speculation into the nature of humor, Arthur Koestler has theorized [in The Act of Creation] that human laughter may be a sort of alternative satisfaction of “biological drives,” a substitute for “killing and copulating,” for planting antipersonnel bombs. The aggression implied in laughter—and laughter almost always involves ridicule, bringing low—is “sublimated, often unconscious,” but the mechanism of laughter surely involves a psychic effort to reduce or even imaginatively destroy its objects; and we can agree that a good part of the comic phenomenon might be understood as brutality without consequence.

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I discovered The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler’s classic book on science, art and humor, as a college freshman in 1965. It had been published the year before. At nearly 500 pages, it is not an easy read. Or, it might be better to say that the text, as one moves through it, is immensely pleasurable, stirring and insightful. That is especially true of Part One. In Part Two, as Koestler cautions, the wording thickens somewhat and the content grows more technical. But you must not be put off by this. 

Over the years, I have owned six or seven copies of this book, and yet I have never read the entire text in sequence, page by page from beginning to end. I don’t think it works best for that. But most likely I’ve read every word, in session lengths and sequences that seemed appropriate at the time. Even today, I still go back to it, because its concepts are so illuminating, and the writing is so perfectly phrased. I have learned immeasurably, I don’t deny, from other educational opportunities, and from other published sources, but I continue to be convinced that, at a critical point in my life, Koestler’s book provided a “big picture” framework for those.  

The entire book is now available free online. If the book seems somewhat daunting, you might first read an essay I wrote in 1998. More recently, I produced a short video talk on the subject, which is also free online. Near the end of the video, I recall an incident that took place in my classroom, back in 1968, when I was a 7-12 art teacher in a public school. In subsequent years, as a university professor (and as a grapher design and writer) I made frequent use of Koestler's approach to innovation—and I still use it to this day.

the process by which creativity works / koestler

Roy R. Behrens, from the film narration in HOW TO WIN KINGS AND INFLUENCE CABBAGES: The Process by Which Creativity Works (2022), free to watch online on YouTube here—

As a college student, I was required to read for a humanities class Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Albert Camus’ The Stranger, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Years later, I found out that, amusingly, all three of these literary titans had been drinking companions in postwar Paris, and that on one unforgettable evening in 1949 a greatly intoxicated Koestler (who was small and reputedly scrappy) had thrown a glass at Sartre and given Camus a black eye.

My favorite photograph of Koestler was made in the same year as that famous brawl by Dmitri Kessel for Life magazine [see above]. A double portrait of the Hungarian-born British writer and his magnificent boxer Sabby, it is memorable in part because of the uncanny resemblance between dog and master—boxer meets boxer, they seem deliberately to be imitating one another.

It is also, as might be said, a “self-exemplifying” image because that portrait is a superb example of what Koestler identified as the key ingredient throughout all creative activity: “The discovery of hidden similarities” or bisociation (perceiving things “in two self-consistent but incompatible frames of reference at the same time”).

familiar american icons / artifacts made strange

Above Dust jacket for Brooke L. Blower and Mark Philip Bradley, eds., The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts After the Transnational Turn. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.  Available online at Internet Archive.

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In browsing, I was struck by the power and appropriateness of this book cover (annoyingly, the cover designer goes unmentioned). The contents of the book are equally interesting, such as “William Howard Taft’s Drawers” by Andrew J. Rotter, and “Josephine Baker’s Banana Skirt” by Matthew Pratt Guterl. As noted in an earlier blog post, it was a Nebraska expatriate playwright named Virgil Geddes whose job it was to assist Josephine Baker in donning her famous scanty banana attire at the Folies Bergere.

The often-quoted phrase “to make the familiar strange” can be traced to an essay titled “Art as Technique" by Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovsky, first published in 1917. His term for the process was defamilarization or ostranenie. I myself prefer this translation of what he wrote—

Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, ones wife, and the fear of war…And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an esthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object, the object is not important.

In The Novel of the Future (1968), the writer Anaïs Nin rephrased Shklovsky’s concept in a brief (and perhaps too familiar) form as follows—

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

As I have written elsewhere, I became acquainted with Victor Shklosky’s ideas during years of corresponding with American writer Guy Davenport. It eventually occurred to me that there is a reciprocal process, of equal value in the innovation process, which might be called “making the strange familiar.”

Robert Frost, Georges De Mestral, and Velcro

In a video that we recently produced on the nature of the creative process (titled How to Win Kings and Influence Cabbages), we mentioned the invention of the fastener called Velcro by Swiss engineer Georges De Mestral, introduced in 1955. The legend of its origin is that the idea came to De Mestral as he was walking in the woods with his dog. 

When they returned home, De Menstral was at first dismayed by the efficiency with which burrs from burdock plants had become attached to his dog’s fur as well as to his clothing. Being an engineer, he made good of the situation. When he examined the plant burrs under a microscope, he discovered the ingenuity of their hook-and-loop effectiveness. Voila!

Since posting that film, we were pleased to run across a passage by American poet Robert Frost. He compares the process of literary innovation to the fortuitous attachment of burrs to ones clothing, while taking a walk—a wonderful concurrence with the experience of De Mestral. The excerpt follows.

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Robert Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes” in Complete Poems. New York: Henry Holt, 1949—

[Scholars get their knowledge] with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields…

hot water fed by volcanic underground springs

how shifts of attention enable innovation

In so many, all but countless ways, let us hope that our fortunes are better this year.

Casey Clabough, Elements: The Novels of James Dickey. Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 2002, pp. 93-94—

In a memorable description of Adolph Hitler and fascism, Arthur Koestler declares: “Half of Hitler’s genius consisted in hitting the right unconscious chords [aka "dog whistles"]. The other half was his alert eclecticism, his flair for hyper-modern avant-garde methods in Economy, Architecture, Technique, Propaganda and Warfare. The secret of Fascism is the revival of archaic beliefs in an ultra-modern setting. The Nazi edifice was a skyscraper fitted with hot water pipes which drew on underground springs of volcanic origin.”

the process by which creativity works / video

Just posted: HOW TO WIN KINGS AND INFLUENCE CABBAGES: The Process By Which Creativity Works

mammoth flyer / elephantine mastodon hybrid

Before I became a university professor, I taught briefly in a public school. One day, in a class of seventh grade students, I came prepared to talk about usually unnoticed connections between familiar objects, and in particular, about skeletal structures. I brought with me to school that day various examples of medical x-rays, a plastic model of the skeleton of a mastodon, and the balsa wood wings of an unassembled model airplane. I displayed these on a table top in preparation for my talk. But I was then distracted by some other event in the classroom, and I briefly turned aside.

When I returned to the table, I found, to my surprise and great delight, that one of the students had spontaneously attached the airplane wings to the skeleton of the mastodon. I was so pleased by this invention that I permanently mounted the wings, added a wooden base, and painted the hybrid construction. Obviously, a new idea had taken flight, and the title I later chose for it was the Mammoth Flyer. It appealed to a wide range of people, as was confirmed, a few years later, when it was stolen from an art exhibition.

gestalt theory, attention, and problem-solving

Thinking Outside the Box (2022)