Paradox and Synthesis
There is an obvious contrast between the emotive reactions of creator and consumer: the person who invents the joke or comic idea seldom laughs in the process. The creative stress under which he labours is not of the same kind as the emotions aroused in the audience. He is engaged in an intellectual exercise, a feat of mental acrobatics; even if motivated by sheer venom it must be distilled and sublimated. Once he has hit on the idea and worked out the logical structure, the basic pattern of the joke, he uses his tricks of the trade -- suspense, emphasis, implication -- to work up the audience's emotions; and to make these explode in laughter when he springs his surprise-effect on them.
Now the humorist may also experience surprise at the moment when the idea hits him -- particularly if it was generated by the unconscious. But there is a basic difference between a shock imposed from outside and a quasi self-administered shock. The humorist has solved his problem by joining two incompatible matrices together in a paradoxical synthesis. His audience, on the other hand, has its expectations shattered and its reason affronted by the impact of the second matrix on the first; instead of fusion there is collision; and in the mental disarray which ensues, emotion, deserted by reason, is flushed out in laughter.
In the humorist's mind no such divorce occurs; he has nothing to laugh about. At most he may, at the moment of inspiration, hit his desk: 'I have got it.' But the creative stress which is relieved in such minor gestures, symbolic of victory, of opposition vanquished, is of a sublimated nature -- quite unlike the more primitive emotions puffed away in the massive laughter of the audience. The contrast is further illustrated in situations where a person fails to find the solution of a brain-teaser -- and, on being told it, starts hitting, not the desk, but his own benighted head. The redundant tension is worked off in a symbolic gesture of self-punishment -- again a more specific outlet for energies harnessed to intellectual tasks than the laughter-channels of least resistance.
The less suggestive and the more implicit the joke, the more will the consumer's reactions approximate the producer's -- whose mental effort he is compelled to re-create. When the witticism is transformed into epigram, and teasing into challenge, the overflow reflex for primitive emotions is no longer needed, and de-tension assumes more individualized and sophisticated forms; the roar of Homeric laughter is superseded by Archimedes's piercing cry or Kepler's holy ravings.
The creative act of the humorist consisted in bringing about a momentary fusion between two habitually incompatible matrices. Scientific discovery, as we shall presently see, can be described in very similar terms -- as the permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible. Until the seventeenth century the Copernican hypothesis of the earth's motion was considered as obviously incompatible with commonsense experience; it was accordingly treated as a huge joke by the majority of Galileo's contemporaries. One of them, a famous wit, wrote: 'The disputes of Signor Galileo have dissolved into alchemical smoke. So here we are at last, safely back on a solid earth, and we do not have to fly with it as so many ants crawling around a balloon.' [1]
The history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter because they seemed to be a marriage of incompatibles -- until the marriage bore fruit and the alleged incompatibility of the partners turned out to derive from prejudice. The humorist, on the other hand, deliberately chooses discordant codes of behaviour or universes of discourse to expose their hidden incongruities in the resulting clash. Comic discovery is paradox stated -- scientific discovery is paradox resolved.
But here again we find, instead of a clear dividing line, continuous transitions. The paradoxes of Achilles and the Tortoise, or of the Cretan Liar, have, during two millennia, tickled philosophers and teased mathematicians into creative efforts; and Juvenal's si Natura negat, facit indignatio versum remains as true as ever.
Summary
I have started this inquiry with an analysis of humour because it is the only domain of creative activity where a complex pattern of intellectual stimulation elicits a sharply defined response in the nature of a physiological reflex.
The pattern underlying all varieties of humour is bisociative -- perceiving a situation or event in two habitually incompatible associative contexts. This causes an abrupt transfer of the train of thought from one matrix to another governed by a different logic or 'rule of the game'. But certain emotions, owing to their greater inertia and persistence, cannot follow such nimble jumps of thought; discarded by reason, they are worked off along channels of least resistance in laughter.
The emotions in question are those of the self-assertive, aggressive-defensive type, which are based on the sympathico-adrenal system and tend to beget bodily activity. Their counter-parts are the participatory or self-transcending emotions -- compassion, identification, raptness -- which are mediated by physiological processes of a different type, and tend to discharge not in laughter but in tears. As a rule our emotions are a mixture of both; but even in the more subtle or affectionate varieties of humour, an element of aggression -- a drop of adrenalin -- must be present to trigger off the reaction. Laughter is a luxury reflex which could arise only in a creature whose reason has gained a degree of autonomy from the urges of emotion, and enables him to perceive his own emotions as redundant -- to realize that he has been fooled.
After applying the theory to various types of the comic, I discussed the criteria of the humorist's technique: originality or unexpectedness; emphasis through selection, exaggeration and simplification; and economy or implicitness which calls for extrapolation, interpolation and transposition.
The term 'matrix' was introduced to refer to any skill or ability, to any pattern of activity governed by a set of rules -- its 'code'. All ordered behaviour, from embryonic development to verbal thinking, is controlled by 'rules of the game', which lend it coherence and stability, but leave it sufficient degrees of freedom for flexible strategies adapted to environmental conditions. The ambiguity of the term 'code' ('code of laws' -- 'coded message') is deliberate, and reflects a characteristic property of the nervous system: to control all bodily activities by means of coded signals.
The concept of matrices with fixed codes and adaptable strategies, proposed as a unifying formula, appears to be equally applicable to perceptual, cognitive, and motor skills and to the psychological structures variously called 'frames of reference', 'associative contexts', 'universes of discourse', mental 'sets', or 'schemata', etc. The validity of the formula will be tested in the chapters which follow, on various levels from morphogenesis to symbolic thought.
Matrices vary from fully automatized skills to those with a high degree of plasticity; but even the latter are controlled by rules of the game which function below the level of awareness. These silent codes can be regarded as condensations of learning into habit. Habits are the indispensable core of stability and ordered behaviour; they also have a tendency to become mechanized and to reduce man to the status of a conditioned automaton. The creative act, by connecting previously unrelated dimensions of experience, enables him to attain to a higher level of mental evolution. It is an act of liberation -- the defeat of habit by originality.*
NOTES
To p. 90. This, of course, equally applies to pictures. The same Rubens nude will call forth different responses from a schoolboy, an art critic, and a nun. In the National Gallery in Vienna there was once to be seen an admirable Leda of the Venetian school, which bore the inscription: Nackend Weib von böser Gans Gebissen (Naked Wench Bitten by Angry Goose).
To. p. 96. As this book was nearing completion, Professor Burt kindly brought to my attention a paper he wrote on 'The Psychology of Laughter' for a seminar of his post-graduate students, in which he had come to somewhat similar conclusions:
Laughter may be regarded as providing a safety-valve for the overflow of emotional energy, instinctively excited by the perception of some specific situation which automatically tends to stimulate the i
nstinct, but which on closer examination is seen not to require energetic action. . . . Every stimulus to laughter thus involves a double-entendre: there is first the superficial or manifest meaning which tends to arouse an emotion appropriate to some serious situation (and thus momentarily disturbing equilibrium), and secondly the deeper or latent meaning (which contradicts the first impression); and the outlet of laughter is provided to give immediate relief to the superfluous emotional excitement. . . . (Burt, 1945).
PART TWO
THE SAGE
V
MOMENTS OF TRUTH
The Chimpanzee and the Stick
That animals can display originality and inventiveness has been asserted since Aesop, but experimentally demonstrated for the first time by the German psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. In 1918 Köhler published The Mentality of Apes, an account of his experiments with chimpanzees on Teneriffe, which has since become a classic. Here is a characteristic description of an animal discovering the use of tools (my italics):
Nueva, a young female chimpanzee, was tested 3 days after her arrival (11th March, 1914). She had not yet made the acquaintance of the other animals but remained isolated in a cage. A little stick is introduced into her cage; she scrapes the ground with it, pushes the banana skins together in a heap, and then carelessly drops the stick at a distance of about three-quarters of a metre from the bars. Ten minutes later, fruit is placed outside the cage beyond her reach. She grasps at it, vainly of course, and then begins the characteristic complaint of the chimpanzee: she thrusts both lips -- especially the lower -- forward, for a couple of inches, gazes imploringly at the observer, utters whimpering sounds, and finally flings herself on to the ground on her back -- a gesture most eloquent of despair, which may be observed on other occasions as well. Thus, between lamentations and entreaties, some time passes, until -- about seven minutes after the fruit has been exhibited to her -- she suddenly casts a look at the stick, ceases her moaning, seizes the stick, stretches it out of the cage, and succeeds, though somewhat clumsily, in drawing the bananas within arm's length. Moreover, Nueva at once puts the end of her stick behind and beyond her objective. The test is repeated after an hour's interval; on this second occasion, the animal has recourse to the stick much sooner, and uses it with more skill; and at a third repetition, the stick is used immediately, as on all subsequent occasions. [1]
It is obvious that Nueva was not led to her discovery by any process of conditioning, or trial and error. Her behaviour from the moment when her eyes fell on the stick was, in Köhler's words, 'unwaveringly purposeful': she seized the stick, carried it without hesitation to the bars, stretched it out of the cage, and placed it behind the banana -- a smooth, integrated sequence of actions, quite different from the erratic, hit-and-miss behaviour of rats trying to find their way through a maze, or cats trying to get out of a puzzle-box. It was an original, self-taught accomplishment, which had no precedent in the chimpanzee's past. The process which led to her discovery can be described as a synthesis of two previously unconnected skills, acquired in earlier life. In the first place, Nueva had learned to get at bananas outside her cage by squeezing an arm or foot through the bars; the ensemble of variations of this simple skill constitutes matrix number one. She had also acquired the habit -- matrix number two -- of scraping the earth with a stick and of pushing objects about with it. But in this playful activity the stick was never used for any utilitarian purpose; to throw, push, or roll things about is a habit common to a variety of young animals. Nueva's discovery consisted in applying this playful habit as an auxiliary matrix to get at the banana. The moment of truth occurred when Nueva's glance fell on the stick while her attention was set on the banana. At that moment the two previously separate matrices fused into one, and the 'stick to play with' became a 'rake to reach with' -- an implement for obtaining otherwise unobtainable objects.
Like many other discoveries, Nueva's seems a simple and obvious one -- but only after the fact. A dog, for instance, will carry a stick between his teeth, but he will never learn to use it as a rake. Moreover, chimpanzees are not the only species which finds it difficult to apply a 'playful' technique to a utilitarian purpose with which it had not been connected in previous experience; a number of discoveries in the history of human science consisted in just that. Galileo astonished the world when he turned the telescopic toys, invented by Dutch opticians, to astronomic use; the invention of the steam engine as a mechanical toy by Hero of Alexandria in the second century B.C. had to wait two thousand years before it was put to practical use; the geometry of conic sections which Apollonius of Perga had studied in the fourth century B.C. just for the fun of it, gave Kepler, again two thousand years later, his elliptical orbits of the planets; the passion for dice of the Chevalier de Méré made him approach Pascal for advice on a safe gambling system, and thus was the theory of probability born, that indispensable tool of modern physics and biology, not to mention the insurance business. 'It is remarkable', wrote Laplace, 'that a science which began with considerations of play has risen to the most important objects of human knowledge.' Thus at the very start of our inquiry we hit on a pattern -- the discovery that a playful or l'art pour l'art technique provides an unexpected clue to problems in a quite different field -- which is one of the leitmotifs in the history of science.
Nueva's discovery was the use of tools; the next one to be described is the making of tools. Its hero is Sultan, the genius among Köhler's chimpanzees:
(17.2.1914) Beyond some bars, out of arm's reach, lies an objective [a banana]; on this side, in the background of the experiment room, is placed a sawn-off castor-oil bush, whose branches can be easily broken off. It is impossible to squeeze the tree through the railings, on account of its awkward shape; besides, only one of the bigger apes could drag it as far as the bars. Sultan is let in, does not immediately see the objective, and, looking about him indifferently, sucks one of the branches of the tree. But, his attention having been drawn to the objective, he approaches the bars, glances outside, the next moment turns round, goes straight to the tree, seizes a thin slender branch, breaks it off with a sharp jerk, runs back to the bars, and attains the objective. From the turning round upon the tree up to the grasping of the fruit with the broken-off branch, is one single quick chain of action, without the least 'hiatus', and without the slightest movement that does not, objectively considered, fit into the solution described. [2]
Had Sultan known Greek he would certainly have shouted Eureka!
Köhler comments:
For adult man with his mechanized methods of solution, proof is sometimes needed, as here, that an action was a real achievement, not something self-evident; that the breaking off a branch from a whole tree, for instance, is an achievement over and above the simple use of a stick, is shown at once by animals less gifted than Sultan, even when they understand the use of sticks beforehand. [3]
It has been said that discovery consists in seeing an analogy which nobody had seen before. Solomon discovered the analogy between the Shulamite's neck and a tower of ivory. Sultan discovered that a twisted branch on a tree with leaves on it had something in common with a straight, lifeless bamboo-pole lying on the ground. What they had in common was very little: let us say that both looked 'hardish' and 'longish', but that is all. The branch, which previously was part and parcel of the tree, was wrenched out of its visual context -- both figuratively and literally speaking -- and made into a part of another, functional, context.
The now familiar shift of awareness to the previously unimportant 'pole-like' aspect of the branch was very prettily demonstrated by another of Köhler's chimpanzees, Koko. It took Koko much longer to make the same discovery as Sultan; and when at last he had broken off a branch from the tree to use it as a stick, and marched with it towards the banana outside the cage, he:
eagerly picked off one leaf after the other, so that only the long, bare stem was left . . . The pulling off of the leaves is both correct and incorrect; incorrect because it does
not make the stem any longer, correct because it makes its length show up better and the stem thus becomes optically more like a stick. . . . There can be no doubt that Koko did not pull off the leaves in play only; his look and his movements prove distinctly that throughout the performance his attention is wholly concentrated on the banana; he is merely concerned now with preparing the implement. Play looks quite different; and I have never seen a chimpanzee play while (like Koko in this case) he was showing himself distinctly intent upon his ultimate purpose. [4]
Before the chimpanzee actually broke off the branch there must have been a moment when he perceived it as a member of both matrices at the same time -- still a part of the tree but already a detached tool. Thus one could say that Sultan had seen a visual pun: a single form (the branch) attached to two different functions.
The act of discovery has a disruptive and a constructive aspect. It must disrupt rigid patterns of mental organization to achieve the new synthesis. Sultan's habitual way of looking at the tree as a coherent, visual whole had to be shattered. Once he had discovered that branches can be made into tools he never again forgot it, and we may assume that a tree never again looked the same to him as before. He had lost the innocence of his vision, but from this loss he derived an immense gain: the perception of 'branches' and the manipulation of 'tools' were now combined into a single, sensory-motor skill; and when two matrices have become integrated they cannot again be torn asunder. This is why the discoveries of yesterday are the commonplaces of today, and why we always marvel how stupid we were not to see what post factum appears to be so obvious.