The Act of Creation (40 page)

The 'hypnotic effect' of political demagogues has become a cliché,
but one aspect of mass-psychology must be briefly mentioned. The type
of crowd or mob to which Le Bon's classic descriptions still apply, is
fanatical and 'single-minded' because the subtler individual differences
between its members are temporarily suspended; the whole mass is thus
intellectually
adjusted to its lowest common denominator,* but
in terms of dynamic
action
it has a high efficacity, because the
impulses of its members are aligned through narrow slits -- or blinkers --
all pointing in the same direction; hence their experience of being parts
of an irresistible power. This experience of partness within a dynamic
whole leads to a temporary suspension of individual responsibility --
which is replaced by unconditional subordination to the 'controlling
centre', the leader of the crowd. It further entails the temporary
effacement of all self-assertive tendencies: the total surrender of
the individual to the collectivity is manifested in altruistic, heroic,
self-sacrificing acts -- and at the same time in bestial cruelty towards
the enemy or victim of the collective whole. This is a further example
of the self-transcending emotions serving as catalysts or triggers
for their opponents. But let us note that the brutality or heroism
displayed by a fanaticized crowd is quasi-impersonal, and unselfish; it is
exercised in the interest, or supposed interest, of the whole. The same
S.S. detachments which mowed down the whole male population of Lidice
were capable of dying at Oradur like the defenders of Thermopylae. The
self-assertive behaviour of a mass is based on the participatory behaviour
of the individual, which often entails sacrifice of his personal
interest and even his life. Theories of ethics based on enlightened
self-interest fail to provide an answer why a man should sacrifice his
life in the defence of his family -- not to mention country, liberty,
beliefs. The fact that men have always been prepared to die for (good,
bad, or futile) causes, proves that the self-transcending tendencies
are as basic to his mental organization as the others. And since the
individual cannot survive without some form of social integration,
self-preservation itself always implies a component of self-transcendence.
Excepting saints and maniacs, our emotions nearly always consist
of mixed feelings, where both tendencies (and both branches of the
autonomous nervous system) participate in the mixture. Love, of course,
is a many-splendoured thing, both with regard to its variety (sexual,
platonic, parental, oedipal, narcissistic, patriotic, canine-directed,
or feline-oriented as the technicians would say), and also with regard to
the extraordinary cocktail of emotions which each variety represents. Much
less obvious is the fact, that even such a simple and scientifically
respectable drive as hunger should give rise to mixed emotions. If I may
return to the subject (
p. 294
) for a moment: on
the one hand, food is 'attacked'; it is 'wolfed'; one 'puts one's teeth
into it'; biting and supping are the very prototypes of aggression. On
the other hand, the 'feeding drive' is stimulated or inhibited by the
company participating in the meal; and the sacred element in the rituals
of mensality (still surviving, for instance, in the funeral and wedding
feasts) I have already mentioned. The teeth are tools of aggression,
but the mouth is a preferential zone of affectionate bodily contact
in billing and kissing. The German idiom
Ich habe dich zum Fressen
gerne
-- I love you so much I could eat you -- and the English
'devouring love' are symbolized by the behaviour of young mothers
mock-devouring the baby's fingers and toes; it may be a distant echo
of the gentle cannibal. Incidentally, we are told that among certain
tribes practising ritual cannibalism, to be eaten is regarded as a great
compliment; perhaps the male of the praying mantis feels the same way.

 

 

Lastly, the seemingly most altruistic social behaviour may have an
admixture of conscious or unconscious self-assertion. Professional
do-gooders, charity tigresses, hospital matrons, prison visitors,
missionaries, and social workers are indispensable to society, and do
an admirable amount of good; to pry into their motives, often hidden to
themselves, would be ungrateful and churlish.

 

 

 

Summary

 

 

Weeping is an overflow reflex for an excess of the participatory emotions,
as laughter is for the self-asserting emotions. Its nervous mechanism and
bodily manifestations are the opposites of those of laughter with regard
to facial expression, respiratory pattern, bodily posture. In laughter
tension is exploded, emotion denied; in weeping it is gradually drained
away without break in the continuity of mood; thought and emotion remain
united. The self-asserting emotions worked off in laughter depend on
the sympathico-adrenal system, which galvanizes the body into activity;
lachrymation is controlled by the parasympathetic division whose action
is inward-directed and cathartic. The self-transcending emotions which
overflow in tears cannot be satisfied by any specific muscular activity;
they tend towards passivity and self-abandonment, and are consummated
in glandular and visceral reactions.

 

 

The various causes of weeping which have been discussed -- raptness,
weeping in sorrow, in joy, in sympathy, or in self-pity -- all have a
basic element in common: a craving to transcend the island boundaries
of the individual, to enter into a symbiotic communion with a human
being or some higher entity, real or imaginary, of which the self
is felt to be a part. Owing to the peculiarities of our cultural
climate, the participatory emotions have been virtually ignored by
contemporary psychology, although they are as real and observable in
their manifestations as hunger, rage, and fear. They are grounded in
the hierarchic order of life where every entity has the dual attributes
of partness and wholeness, and the dual potentialities of behaving as
an autonomous whole or a dependent part. The classification of emotions
which I have proposed is based on this general principle of polarity, to
be found on every level of the organic and social heirarchies (cf. Book
Two). The dual concept of adaptable matrices with fixed invariant codes
is derived from the same principle.

 

 

In the development of the individual, as in the evolution of cultures,
the manifestations of the participatory tendencies show a progression,
comparable to that of the aggressive-defensive emotions from primitive
and infantile to adult forms. The 'symbiotic consciousness' of infancy,
with its fluid ego boundaries, is partly relegated to the subconscious
strata -- from which the artist and the mystic draw their inspirations;
partly superseded by the phenomena of projection and introjection,
empathy and identification, transference and hypnosis. Similarly, the
participatory bonds of primitive magic are gradually transformed into
symbolic rituals, mythological epics, and mystery plays: into the magic
of illusion. The shadows in Plato's cave are symbols of man's loneliness;
the paintings in the Lascaux caves are symbols of his magic powers.

 

 

The participatory emotions, like their opposites, can be accompanied by
feelings of pleasure or un-pleasure which form a continuous scale, and
add a third dimension to emotional experience. Lastly, identification,
in itself a self-transcending experience, can serve as a vehicle (or
trigger) for vicarious emotions of anger and fear.

 

 

 

NOTES

 

 

To
p. 294
. The point has been succinctly. made
by Walter de la Mare:

 

It's a very odd thing --
As odd as can be --
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.

 

To
p. 296
. 'In relation to the dissolution
of the ego complex, identification can receive a somewhat different
interpretation according as ego-components are projected into the outside
world or as elements from the outside world are incorporated into the
personality. In very fluid dream processes such a distinction cannot
usually be very accurately drawn; but in schizophrenia, for example, both
possibilities can be most clearly experienced.' (Kretschmer, 1954, p. 93.)

 

 

To
p. 297
. The expression '
lowest
common
denominator' is mathematically nonsensical; it should, of course, be
'highest'. But the 'highest common denominator' in a crowd of large
number is still pretty low; thus the faulty idiom conveys the right idea,
and the correct expression would only create confusion.

 

 

 

 

 

B. VERBAL CREATION

 

 

XV
ILLUSION
The Power of Illusion
Literature begins with the telling of a tale. The tale represents events
by means of auditory and visual signs. The events thus represented
are mental events in the narrator's mind. His motive is the urge to
communicate these events to others, to make them relive his thoughts
and emotions; the urge to
share
. The audience may be physically
present, or an imagined one; the narrator may address himself to a
single person or to his god alone, but his basic need remains the same:
he must share his experiences, make others participate in them, and thus
overcome the isolation of the self.
To achieve this aim, the narrator must provide patterns of stimuli
as substitutes for the original stimuli which caused the experience to
occur. This, obviously, is not an easy task, for he is asking his audience
to react to things which are not there, such as the smell of grass on a
summer morning. Since the dawn of civilization, bards and story-tellers
have produced bags of tricks to provide such Ersatz-stimuli. The sum of
these tricks is called the art of literature.
The oldest and most fundamental of all tricks is to disguise people in
costumes and to put them on a stage with masks or paint on their faces;
the audience is thereby given the impression that the events represented
are happening here and now, regardless of how distant they really are
in space and time. The effect of this procedure is to induce a very
lively bisociated condition in the minds of the audience. The spectator
knows, in one compartment of his mind, that the people on the stage are
actors, whose names are familiar to him; and he knows that they are
'acting' for the express purpose of creating an illusion in him, the
spectator. Yet in another compartment of his mind he experiences fear,
hope, pity, accompanied by palpitations, arrested breathing, or tears
-- all induced by events which he knows to be pure make-believe. It
is indeed a remarkable phenomenon that a grown-up person, knowing all
the time that he faces a screen onto which shadows are projected by a
machine, and knowing furthermore quite well what is going to happen at
the end -- for instance, that the police will arrive just in the nick
of time to save the hero -- should nevertheless go through agonies of
suspense, and display the corresponding bodily symptoms. It is even more
remarkable that this capacity for living in two universes at once, one
real, one imaginary, should be accepted without wonder as a commonplace
phenomenon. The following extract from a London newspaper report may
help to restore our sense of wonder: [1]

Twice a week, with a haunting, trumpeted signature tune and a
view of terraced roofs stretching away into infinity, "Coronation
Street", Granada Television's serial of North Country life, goes on
the air. It has now had 200 issues and is coming up to its second
birthday next week. It is one of Britain's most popular television
programmes. Enthusiasts call it a major sociological phenomenon. In fact
all marathon TV serials with fixed settings and regular characters are
cunningly designed to turn the viewer into an addict. Coronation
Street eschews glamour and sensational curtains and concentrates
on trapping the rugged smug ambience on North Country working and
lower middle-class life. It will follow a local event like a council
election or an amateur theatrical through instalment after instalment
with the tenacity of a parish magazine. Its characters provide parts
that actors can sink their teeth into and digest and assimilate. They
have become deeply planted, like the permanent set of seven terraced
houses, the shop on the corner, the Mission Hall, and the pub.
The characters have devotees who insist on believing in their
reality. When the buxom Elsie Tanner was involved with a sailor who,
unknown to her, was married, she got scores of letters warning her of
the danger. Jack Watson, the actor who played the sailor, was stopped
outside the studio by one gallant mechanic who threatened to give him
a hiding if he didn't leave Elsie alone.
The strongest personality of them all, the sturdy old bulldog bitch,
Ena Sharples, has a huge following. When she was sacked from the
Mission Hall of which she was caretaker, viewers from all over the
country wrote offering her jobs. When she was in hospital temporarily
bereft of speech, a fight broke out in Salford between a gang of her
fans and an Irish detractor who said he hoped the old bag would stay
dumb till Kingdom come.
Moreover, when one of the seven houses on the set became 'vacant'
because its owner was said to have moved -- in fact because the actor
in question had been dropped from the programme -- there were several
applications for renting the house; and when at a dramatic moment of
the serial the barmaid in the 'Rover's Return' smashed an ornamental
plate, several viewers sent in replacements to comfort her.

Of course, these people know that they are watching actors. Do they
nevertheless believe that the characters are real? The answer is
neither yes nor no, but yes and no. The so-called law of contradiction
in logic -- that a thing is either A or not-A but cannot be both -- is
a late acquisition in the growth of individuals and cultures
(