Living, Thinking, Looking: Essays by Siri Hustvedt

Author:Siri Hustvedt [Hustvedt, Siri]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2012-06-04T21:00:00+00:00

The subliminal self plays an important role in mathematical creation … we have seen that mathematical work is not simply mechanical, that it could not be done by a machine, however perfect. It is not merely a question of applying rules, of making the most combinations possible according to fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome.39

Every once in a while a formula, a poem, an essay, a novel bursts forth as in a waking dream. The poet Czeslaw Milosz once said: “Frankly all my life I have been in the power of a daimonion, and how the poems dictated by him came into being, I do not quite understand.”40 William Blake said his poem “Milton” “was written from immediate dictation … without premeditation and sometimes against my will.”41 Nietzsche described thoughts that came to him like bolts of lightning. “I never had any choice about it.”42 The last pages of my novel The Sorrows of an American were written in a trance. They seemed to write themselves. Such revelations may well be based on years of laborious living, reading, learning, and cogitating, but they come as revelations nevertheless.

A retreat to nineteenth-century science is needed to frame this creative phenomenon. F. W. H. Myers was a renowned psychical researcher and a friend of William James, who is now mostly forgotten. His magnum opus was called Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,43 a title which no doubt hastened his oblivion. Still, he was a sophisticated thinker who applied the idea of automatisms to creativity. Unlike Jackson’s habitual automatisms or the pathological dissociations of hysteria studied by Pierre Janet or Freud’s idea of sublimation, Myers argued that subliminally generated material could suddenly find its way into consciousness, and that this eruption was not necessarily the product of hysteria, neurosis, or any other mental illness.

The definition of creativity in neuroscience research I have stumbled over again and again is: “the production of something novel and useful within a given social context.”44 Useful? Was Emily Dickinson’s work considered useful? Within her given social context, her radical, blazingly innovative poems had no place. Are they useful now? This research definition must be creativity understood in the corporate terms of late capitalism. Another component of creativity featured in these studies is divergent thinking, or DT. In one study, subjects’ brains were scanned as they “produced multiple solutions to target problems.” The more solutions, the more creativity, but this is obtuse, as Poincaré pointed out so succinctly. We are not machines or computers but embodied beings guided by a vast unconscious and felt emotions.

I have often asked myself, Why tell one fictional story and not another? Theoretically, a novelist can write about anything, but she doesn’t. It is as if the fabula is already there waiting and must be laboriously unearthed or suddenly unleashed from memory. That process is not exclusively the result of so-called higher cognition; it not purely cognitive or linguistic. When I write, I see images in

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