Poetics 8 (1979) 269-306 0 North-Holland Publishing Company
TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF CREATIVITY
ROBERT-ALAIN
*
DE BEAUGRANDE
The paper examines some possible foundations from linguistics for a general theory of creativity in language, such as: (1) the externahst viewpoint, which stresses ‘deviation’; (2) the internalist viewpoint, which stresses rule application; and (3) the concepts of ‘equivalence’ and ‘recurrence’. The investigation of sample texts shows that none of these foundations, taken within its usual limitations, allows us to make the distinctions in degrees of creativity that our intuition demands. Therefore, a new theory of creativity as the motivated modification ofsysterns is set forth. Special emphasis is placed upon systems of meaning, which can be effectively represented by network plotting. Various areas of creative language use serve as illustrations of the theory in application: poetry, paradoxes, jokes, nonsense, narratives, and fictionality. Some possible implications for education and artificial intelligence conclude the discussion.
1. The external% and the intemalist viewpoints
1.1. If language were indeed a conditioned response to stimuli as claimed by the behaviorist school of thought inherited from Leonard Bloomfield (1933), creativity would not be conceivable as a linguistic issue at all. Behaviorism has no sort of provision for the possibility that an organism, instead of conforming to the stimuli from the environment in the standard way, might invent something entirely new. Should that occur, the organism would be viewed as simply dysfunctional, and its activities as exempt from the processes governed by normalcy. More recently, the fact that many language utterances are new to their users has received increased consideration, leading to the insight that behaviorism is a staggeringly uneconomical and, at some point, unworkable model for human language use. Although many cases can be devised in which utterances appear as responses to direct stimuli (e.g., as enumerated by Salzillo 1976), the most pressing concern for investigation lies in the processes of planning and computation which control the use of language, even if those processes are occasionally suspended or bypassed. 2.2. Theoretically, the set of possible utterances in a language is infinite. Yet the * Expanded version of the opening speech at the Interdisciplinary Conference on Linguistics, ‘Productivity, Novelty, and Creativity in Language’, University of Louisville, April 7-8, 1978. For personal discussions, I am indebted especially to Wolfgang Dressier, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Walter Kin&h, and James Meehan. 269
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procedures for making decisions within the activities of producing and comprehending utterances cannot be infinite - as a strict pairing of stimulus with response would tend to imply - if language is to be acquired and used at all. The search for a finite basis underlying potentially infinite numbers of manifestations has become the main incentive of modern linguistics (Koch 1973: xvi). The status of both the finite basis and the infinite set of manifestations is still hotly disputed (see now Bjurlof and Jamieson 1978); but it seems reasonable that the mediation between the finite and the infinite must be accomplished by a general dzeoy of creativity. For example, transformational grammar can be described as a theory of “rulegoverned creativity” (Babitch 1977: 337). Here, a serious and still unsolved problem arises: can creativity transcend the control of the rules, and to what extent, by what means, and for what motives? 1.3. If we attempt to find a location for a theory of creativity within the domain of conventional linguistics, we can tentatively identify two viewpoints. According to what might be called the EXTERNALIST viewpoint - implied especially by descriptive structural linguistics with its behaviorist roots - creativity appears outside the norms of the language, as a violation of norms, and possibly outside linguistics as well, being better relegated to the (supposedly independent?) domain of stylistics or else to the largely unmapped domain of ‘parole’. According to the INTERNALIST viewpoint - implied by generative grammars - creativity is the basic act whereby competence is transposed into performance. Depending upon a careful selection of samples, one can muster support for both the externalist and the internalist viewpoints. But I shall argue that neither viewpoint is sufficiently flexible and general to account for a wider, less restricted corpus of samples: at some point, counter-intuitive results are obtained. I shall sketch some such problems and then propose a new theory of creativity which offers more satisfactory conclusions. 1.4. First, we should be able to agree upon the issues that a theory of creativity might reasonably be expected to solve: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)
What is the relation of creativity to language overall? How is creative use of language different from non-creative? How is creativity manifested in language? What human activities are involved on the part of the speaker/writer hearer/reader? (v) What are the motivations of creativity?
and the
1.5. The externalist viewpoint reflects the long-standing preoccupation of linguistics with describing language as (a) limited sets of elements in a system, such as minimal units of sound, form, meaning, and so on; and (b) limited sets of procedures for organizing such elements. These sets and procedures are evidently thought to constitute the NORMS of a given language. If creativity went beyond the limits of the norms, we would presumably have an instance of ‘deviation’. The concept of
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deviation has been favored by stylisticians with a linguistic orientation, such as Mukaiovsky (1932), Spitzer (1948) Sayce (1953), Levin (1963, 1965), and Enkvist (1973). Insights contributed by this tradition are indeed impressive, but a major problem seems to be still much disputed: deviation from what? 1.6. In the neo-positivist tradition, deviations were considered something manifest and thus accessible to direct observation - a surface phenomenon, in modern parlance. As a result, only very limited aspects of creativity could be treated, such as the creation of neologisms (from Mukaiovsky 1932 to Dressier 1977). Care was expended to select samples with obvious surface deviations, such as the e.e. cummings poem beginning with the lines: (1) anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn’t he danced his did
This poem, discussed over and over by linguists (Thorne 1965; Hendricks 1969; Fowler 1969;Butters 1969;Carstensen 1970;Enkvist 1971;Koch 1972,etc.)showsdeviations immediately describable in terms of standard grammar of English: ‘a pretty how town’, ‘he danced his did’, and so forth. Yet we will find few literary scholars willing to declare e.e. Cummings representative of poetry at large. The more writers we examine, the more the seemingly clear boundary between the norms and the abnormal fades away - especially if we place too much reliance on surface features. I. 7. Carried to its logical extreme, the concept of deviation as usually discussed would yield such problematic postulates as the following: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)
Creative/poetic texts must be deviant on the surface. Well-formed texts are not creative/poetic. A deviant text is ipso facto creative. Creativity varies in proportion to the number and degree of deviations.
1.8. These postulates can lead to conclusions that violate our intuitions about the use of language. A few examples can serve to illustrate the problems. In such a pair of utterances as: (2) The cat sat on the mat.
(3) Mat the sat cat the on.
we can distinguish unequivocally between the normal/grammatical (2) and the abnormal/ungrammatical (3). But (3) is sufficiently unlikely to occur spontaneously (setting aside discussions among linguists) that it is in effect a non-text and hence a poor sample of creativity. If we study such a pair as this: (3) Mat the sat cat the on
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(4) Thee, chantress, oft the woods among
I woo to hear thy evensong (Milton, II Penseroso)
we find both grammatically deviant; yet our intuition is clearly to regard (4) as a good sample of creativity. The concept of deviation alone obscures the distinction we would want to maintain between (3) and (4). On the other hand, if we contrast the grammatical (2) with a different utterance: (2) The cat sat on the mat. (5) The splendour falls on castle walls
(Tennyson, song from The Princess)
we find no way to reflect our intuition that (5) is more creative than (2) even though both have essentially the same grammatical structure and even similar rime schemes. Finally we can juxtapose two very different literary samples: (6) Rev. George Gilfilian of Dundee, I must conclude my muse And to write in praise of thee my pen does not refuse (Wm. ~lcGonagal1, Address to the Rec. George Gilfillan) (7) To this I witness call the fools of time Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime (Wm. Shakespeare, Sonnet 124)
Both of these samples would be admissable by the deviation standard as well as by reference to surface features (rime, rhythm); yet our intuition would rate (7) as much more creative than (6). We can conclude by examining these various pairs that surface deviations alone provide no workable standard for evaluating or measuring creativity in language use. 1.9. The internalist viewpoint brings problems at the other end of the spectrum of grammaticality. Richard Ohmann (1964) showed that the use of certain standard transformations provides a criterion for contrasting the styles of Faulkner, Hemingway, James, and Lawrence. It might appear that the creative activities of these authors can be formally reconstructed by recourse to transformational rules. To the extent that non-grammatical sequences occurred, these could be derived from wellformed ones by suspending or adding rules (cf: Chomsky 1964; Weinreich 1966; Fowler 1969). An important insight emerged that the externalist notion of ‘deviation’ had tended to obscure: that non-ordinary language use is effective by its analogy as well as by its opposition to ordinary language. If we rely on transformational grammar, however, we are admittedly not dealing with the human activities of text creation. Moreover, the grammar would still not be able to rate the difference of creativity between two well-formed samples such as (2) and (5) where grammatical structure is almost identical. 1.10. The internalist viewpoint is combined with the externalist one in many
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proposals for “a generative grammar of literary texts” (van Dijk 1972b). Here, subsidiary rules are postulated which form texts not directly producible by the standard grammar. Manfred Bierwisch (1965) justly notes that the violation of standard rules is not arbitrary or random, but leads instead toward new regularities. Yet the status of such new ‘rules’ is very doubtful: it is surely uneconomical and unconvincing to expand a grammar with additional rules with only one or very few applications. Also, the new rules are plainly more sensitive to special motivations than standard rules, suggesting a problematic difference of qualitative nature. How can we account for the additions of certain new rules as opposed to the vast number of possible alternatives? This is a question of control and cannot be solved by transformational grammar in any of the usual conceptions. 1.11. The questions posed in 1.4. can be only partially answered by the viewpoints discussed so far. The relation of creativity to language overall is either one of exclusion (externalist viewpoint) or rule application (internalist viewpoint). In either case, the creativity is discoverable only by recourse to surface features specifiable within usual grammars. The human activities and the motivations entailed in creativity cannot be explicated by either viewpoint and would perhaps even be considered non-linguistic topics. 1.12. The theory of “equivalences” as promoted especially by Jakobson (1960, 1968; compare the concept of “coupling” in Levin 1962) shares aspects of both externalist and internalist origin. On the one hand, the density of equivalences and recurrences is considered non-normal with regard to the language as a whole; on the other, the equivalences are derived from special utilization of language potential theoretically available to all speakers at all times. The ‘over-fulfillment of linguistic norms can itself appear as ‘deviation’; but the resulting formation of texts is still under the direct control of norms, rather than outside. Now, if equivalence and recurrence are used as a measure of creativity, an alarming paradox results: the more redundant or repetitious the text, the higher the creativity! Surely such a text as (8) A a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a (etc.)
cannot be the ideal of creative language use. 1.13. Theories based on equivalence and recurrence share a tendency to disregard or at least de-emphasize the communicative function of language. Jakobson (1960: 356) speaks of “focus on the message for its own sake”, as if the referential function were somehow suspended. The trend is similar when aestheticians assert that “We experience an object aesthetically when we look at it [...I without relating it, intellectually or emotionally, to anything outside itself’ (E. Panofsky, cited in Kirby 1969: 37). Fortunately, such pronouncements are not taken seriously in practice, even by their originators; otherwise, aesthetic objects would be stripped of all relevance to human experience beyond those objects. It is absurd to assert that the words of a poem cease to refer, even if we do not expect to find exact real-
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world correlates in actual experience: the words still refer to potenfiul experience and draw their effects primarily from that source. At best, the solipsistic tendencies in theories of ‘language for its own sake’ are explainable as attempts to escape the admittedly difficult issues of relevance and referentiality by means of a global alibi.
2. A systems theory of creativity 2.1. For motives sketched out above, 1 would be inclined to view the most common concepts associated with creativity, such as deviation, rule violation and addition, or equivalence and recurrence, as inadequate for a general theory of creativity. These concepts do not capture the differences between the samples shown in 1.8., nor do they answer the questions posed in 1.4. satisfactorily. The theory 1 shall propose can be defined as the MOTIVATED MODIFICATION OF SYSTEMS. 2.2. In this viewpoint, language is not simply a system of signs or minimal units, but rather an INTERSYSTEM: an integrated set of participating systems whose workings are made possible by mutual correlation. Each system is definable by three factors: (1) the elements it contains; (2) the organizational principles applicable to those elements; and (3) the correlation of the system to others within the intersystem. Being an assembly of mutually relevant elements, the text is itself a system. But since the text draws its elements from participating language systems, and its motivations and effects from systems of human behavior, 1 would prefer to call a text a TRANSSYSTEM. In contrast to language systems, whose state is stabilized by the synchronic viewpoint, the text is a systeni with TRANSITIONS between STATES such as information states (what is known or in focus at any point). In effective communication, the hearer/reader reenacts the various states in accordance with the planning of the speaker/writer. The transitions between states justify describing discourse as a type of ACTION (cf: van Dijk 1977: 2): changes are achieved which would not have occurred otherwise (the basic definition of action according to von Wright 1967). Given appropriate motivation, the producer of a text may TRANSCEND the direct control of language systems, for instance, by creating new lexical items or ungrammatical sequences. This transcendance is the basic activity of creativity, and can be classed according to systems theory in three catagories: (i) The repertory of elements in a system is modified (creation of new elements or transformation of existing elements);cf: 5.7., S.9., 6.6.1., and 6.6.5. (ii) The organizational principles of a system are modified (discrepancies appear in constelIations of elements); CL 4.6., 5.1., 5.3., 6.1.) 6.3., and 6.5.-6. (iii) The principles of correlation between systems are modified (non-standard controls are imposed between systems, as when sound properties influence the semantic formation of a text); cf: 4.11., 4.12., 5.4., 5.5., 6.6.6., and 6.6.7.
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2.3. In the past, linguistics has been justly concerned with the repertories and organizational principles of systems of language in relative isolation, especially systems of sounds and sequencing (syntax). Such research is antecedent to a theory of the correlation of systems in an intersystem such as language. However, exclusive attention to isolated systems leads to serious difficulties in dealing with the transsystemic entity of the TEXT. While we can describe the sounds or syntax of a text, we have no universally accepted means for integrating that description into an account of how the text functions in communication. The principles of systems correlation need not be the same or even similar to the principles for managing an isolated system - a fact which emerged clearly in the rather unsuccessful attempt to generalize the principles of phonology for describing all aspects of language (Quirk 1976; Koch 1973: xvi). In addition, creative use of language is still harder to treat by mono-systemic principles, except as something external (see above). These considerations suggest that the formation and comprehension of texts cannot be managed by a simple increment or reiinement of sentence grammars. The sentence is a mono-systemic entity defined by syntactic criteria; the text is a transsystemic entity defined by pragmatic criteria. It seems to me at least that ACCEPTABILITY, being, so to speak, “pragmatic well-formedness” (see Greenbaum 1977), cannot be reliably explained without an account of creativity in texts. 2.4. The viewpcint to be advanced here shares the transformationalist conviction that the modification of systems is very seldom random or arbitrary, but instead controlled by the standard potential of those systems. However, the determining factor lies not in setting up new abstract rules with very dubious status, but in adapting the potential of systems to the demands of a particular communicative situation. Without such motivation, a random modification would produce nonacceptable texts such as sample (3). I submit that the factor of motivation can be systematically described, notwithstanding the large diversity of possible surface manifestations. The finite basis of creativity consists of a limited number of context-sensitive strategies (as oppposed to context-free ‘rules’). The need for creativity results quite naturally out of the fact that no system or intersystem can possibly provide for all conceivable situations of application: sooner or later, modification becomes both necessary and desirable. 2.5. The repertory of elements in a language system may be small, or even closed, as in the system of phonemes; or large and potentially open, as in the system of lexemes. Similarly, the organizational principles for managing a system may be rigid, for instance, certain sound clusters or syntactic configurations being disallowed in a language; or these principles may be relatively flexible, allowing for many varied manifestations, some of which occur frequently while others do not, for instance formation of words (cf: Lees 1960: 121; Dressler 1977). Creativity that affects closed sets and rigid organizational principles will appear to the hearer/ reader more radical and perhaps less acceptable tha,.l that which affects opens sets or flexible principles. However, the motivation of a given modification may outweigh this general gradation and justify very radical innovations. Hence, the largely
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context-free aspect of systems organization seen in abstraction and isolation must be constantly correlated with the context-bound aspect of systems in application. 2.6. For the reasons just cited, a given text may be creative in one occurrence, but not in later occurrences. If a modification is performed repeatedly, it loses its effectiveness, because (1) it becomes standardized and thus part of the system which it originally transcended; (2) the hearer/reader processes the text with respect to the system rather than to the actual situation; and (3) the motivation of the modification at the time and place of occurrence declines or is lost altogether. A stock metaphor soon becomes a conventional element of the lexical system. A well-known joke is not amusing, since the solution is known in advance, and the hearer/reader’s act of re-creating, as a part of the ongiong interaction, becomes superfluous. 2.7. It follows that creativity is not measurable by surface features of texts; still less is it special focus upon the ‘message for its own sake’. Instead, creativity must be defined as a shared activity of speaker/writer and hearer/reader. Creative use of language intensifies interaction between these two, and is accordingly a key factor in effective communication. The modification performed by the speaker/writer upon systems repertories, organization, or correlation, as well as the motivation of such modification, must be recoverable or reconstructable by the hearer/reader, if communication is successful. Such recovery or reconstruction need not be performed explicitly or consciously (it is probably not, in most cases), nor must it match the speaker/writer’s own estimation of the original act of modification. It is not unusual in creative language use to allow several compatible or competing possibilities side by side - a situation well described as “polyfcmctionally” (Schmidt 1971). But if no recovery is possible, as would be the case with sample (3) in most imaginable situations, the text seems unacceptable and potentially even meaningless. 2.8. It might appear that the foregoing proposal would undermine the stability of creative texts, leading to the ‘affective fallacy’ so abhorred by Wimsatt (1967). But the problem is much more general, extending to texts of all kinds. The stability of the text as a transsystemic entity is guaranteed only by the stability of participating language systems. If the latter undergo changes, the possible uses of the text will shift also, chiefly in two ways: (1) the interpretations performed on the text match that intended by the producer to a decreasing degree; or (2) an intermediary text is interposed to help the hearer/reader recover the original intention (literary criticism, for example). In creative texts, the recoverability of modifications of systerns is again guaranteed only by knowledge of the standard systems. But to the extent that speaker/writer and hearer/reader share a common base of knowledge (with or without intermediation), the latter’s response to the text will predominantly match the possibilities allowed by the former. Therefore, the stability of texts is ‘meta-stability’, whether or not creativity is present. The understanding of the workings of language systems, being the special concern of linguistics in the past, can thus become the basis for understanding the workings of text, being the most pressing issue of linguistics in the future.
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2.9. The shared activities of speaker/writer and hearer/reader would be obviated if creativity consisted of rule application. Yet the strategies I would postulate rather than rules are still located in the language user’s competence: without those strategies, no performance could ever evince features not explicitly provided by normal grammar except in cases of inattention or error - a wholly unrealistic notion. One might want to distinguish between ‘systemic competence’, the knowledge of the standard potential of language systems; and ‘creative competence’, the knowledge of strategies for adapting systems to contexts of application. Creative competence is activated when a communicative situation cannot be successfully managed by simple adherence to systemic norms. This applies especially if the purposes of the speaker/writer demand intensified participation from the hearer/reader. Such intensified participation has been described as “de-automatisation” (Mukaiovsky 1933,) and presumably demands increased energy for processing (cf: Koch 1977: 12). 2.10. If creativity is the modification of systems, there must exist greater or lesser degrees of tolerance, depending upon such factors as: (1) prior experience with creativity; (2) social standing; (3) degree of familiarity among participants; and (4) topics of communication. If the interrelationship of communicative interactants is very formal, or if they are representing some stable social institution (e.g. in a court of law), creativity tends to be minimized. In some societies, specific channels for creativity are themselves institutionalized, notably art and religion; in totalitarian societies, even these channels are suppressed and persecuted. But a more general defense against creativity as a potential modifier of systems has been to cast a veil of mystery around the act of creation: something unfathomable is manufactured to obscure what I hope to show as an orderly change of systems under controlled, statable conditions. 2.ZZ. It should be noted that creativity is essential in science as well as art. As Thomas Kuhn (1970) notes, normal science works upon an accepted basis of notions about what constitutes a question worth pursuing. However, the accepted need to provide workable explanations for a wide variety of issues constitutes an obligation for creativity when existing theories fail. The evolution of new theories and methods leads to substantial creativity in scientific discourse (see Rapoport 1963). Thus the difference between art and science is certainly not one of maximal versus minimal creativity. But in scientific discourse, the speaker/writer is much more concerned with providing an explicit account of the modification of some system and the relevant motivation, so that interpersonal recovery of these factors is guaranteed. The artistic speaker/writer simply presents the modiftcation and allows interpersonal variation or multiple viewpoints in recovery by the hearer/ reader. The procedures for introducing new elements and organizational principles into the systems of science and of scientific discourse are carefully defined in each discipline. Aside from occasional manifestos whose efficacy remains doubtful, no analogous procedures are available in art. We can conclude that the creative scientist intervenes in the processes of response more directly than does the creative artist. But I do not see the creative activities themselves as categorically different.
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3. Texts and networks 3.1. So far, I have been largely concerned with creativity affecting language systems. But an adequate semantics requires that no strict borderline be drawn between systems of meaning and systems of real-world knowledge, since both aspects depend heavily upon each other. The most promising trend in recent research appears to be NETWORK representation. The network is basically “a directed graph with labelled edges”, whose nodes are objects and events, and whose edges or ‘links’) “represent relations between the nodes they connect, the nature of the relation being indicated by the label of the link” (Hayes 1977: 58). Some uses of networks include representations of (1) word meaning (Quillian 1968; Hayes 1977); (2) members of sets (Grosz 1977) or classes (Levesque and Mylopoulos 1977); (3) logical quantifiers and connectives (Schubert 1975); (4) real-world knowledge (Minsky 1975; Havens 1978); (5) the syntactic structures of texts (Thorne et al. 1968; Woods 1970); (6) the semantic base of texts (Shapiro 1975); and even (6) the psychological processing of texts, such as reading comprehension (Kintsch and Vipond 1979) and memory search (Collins and Loftus 1975). The power and generality of network representations as opposed to tree-branching structures favored by linguists and ordered n-tuples used by logicians rest especially on the multiple accessibility of nodes, a factor which eliminates much redundancy. Also, networks are well suited for representing optional information, which may be absent in a given actualisation without destroying the coherence of the structure. 3.2. To illustrate these points, I shall postulate that experience with objects and events as entities of both language and cognition is processed and stored in network form. Understanding a word or concept means knowing the minimal data in the core network of features and properties conventionally associated with it. The complexity of the entity determines the extent of the core. Also, objects and events in cognition are stored in the form of such a minimal core network, plus any of the additional associations specific to actual occurrences. The processing of words/concepts and objects/events actually encountered is therefore an act of pattern-matching. As soon as a reasonable number of nodes of the actual entity has been successfully matched, the mental network is activated and used to create expectations about data not yet perceived specifically. The time and effort of pattern-matching may be decreased if the entity is very familiar; or increased if competing hypotheses arise about possible alternatives, or if the entity is very unfamiliar. But in any case, pattern-matching is a rapid and powerful method for dealing with all kinds of input, much more so than searching lists of items or rules whose mutual accessibility is purely serial. 3.3. It is both informative and psychologically plausible (see Kintsch 1974; Meyer 1975) to envision the links in a network as PROPOSITIONS. Given nodes x andy, the following relations (among others) can obtain between them: (i) x is a feature/property
ofy
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(ii) x (iii) x (iv) x (v) x (vi) x (vii) x (viii) x (ix) x (x)x (xi) x
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shares the feature/property z (or zl, za, zs, .. . z,) withy is an instantiation/specification of y is a part ofy is an action ofy is spatially proximate toy is temporally proximate toy is causally proximate toy is syntactically proximate toy is a synonym ofy is an antonym ofy
3.4. These propositions may be established by convention, as part of the systems of language (e.g. (x)-(xi)) or real-world organization (e.g. (iii)--(iv)); or they may be created in a specific context of language (e.g. (ix)) or experience (e.g. (vi)-(vii)). The important aspect is that such propositions indicate why certain information nodes are accessible from others. It is always possible to create links between nodes which are not given either in language or ln the standard organization of the realworld: this activity will be defined here as the basic act of CREATIVITY. It must be noted that when a new link is created, new relationships between all of the nodes conventionally accessible from the two nodes just connected become possible. Thus the next step of creativity is to make use of such new relationships in agreement with the text’s motivation. Accordingly, the reader is confronted with what appears to be a discrepancy or a discontinuity, only to discover pathways of access that restore coherence. 3.3. In agreement with this conception, the production and comprehension of texts can be viewed as network instantiation. It is useful to postulate entities of management that represent our expectations about texts, from the standpoint of both language and cognition. Networks of knowledge of the world have often been termed FRAMES (cf: Minsky 1975; Kuipers 1975; Winograd 1975; Petofi 1976), which may range from very general domains (such as the nature of space in Minsky 1975 or the shape of solid objects in Kuipers 1975) to very specific ones (such as the nature of piggy-banks in Charniak 1972). In contrast, SCHEMAS are structural entities for organizing knowledge or input in operations where information is used in a progression, e.g. text processing (cf: Rumelhart 1975; Bobrow and Norman 1975; Kintsch 1977; Rumelhart and Ortony 1977; Anderson and Pichert 1978). Frames are therefore arrays, and schemas are ordered progressions. There is presumably substantial interaction between frames and schemas, for instance, when a particular block of knowledge stored in a frame is arranged to fit a schema needed in a particular context or situation. Such interaction is an important means for maintaining “sense constancy” as defined by Hans Hbrmann (1976): the tendency which guides processing toward the goal of maintaining continuity. Hormann believes (1976: 137) that attainment of this goal terminates mental processing of input (at least active processing). If follows that having to terminate pro-
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cessing without having reached the goal is psychologically disturbing. The human ability to devise short-cuts, including the use of frames and schemas for rapid pattern-matching, thus corresponds to very basic mental reactions to experience of all kinds. The same factor accounts for the limited tolerance for creativity already mentioned in 2.10. If extra effort is expended, we expect to be rewarded by some enriching discoveries: failing that, we are frustrated and may reject the text altogether. I have described the latter phenomenon elsewhere as “frame defense”, but it would apply to any kind of seemingly unmotivated violation of expectations (cf: Beaugrande 1978b). 3.6. As I shall try to show in the following sections, the considerarions set forth so far allow a systematic explication of our intuitions that some texts are better and more convincing manifestations of creativity than others. In addition, we can gain insights into the possibility of different responses to a given instance of creativity by referring to degrees of tolerance that vary inversely with degrees of commitment to established systems. It would seem that experience with creativity is cumulative, in that consistent strategies are developed for use when standardized procedures of processing fail to apply successfully (cf: Beaugrande 1978a). Hence, readers would not accept Finnegan’s Wake or Zettels Trawn as novels without considerable prior training with less radical forms of creativity. I am suspicious of claims that modern art should be or even can be experienced in total suspension of rational processes: it would be more probable to assume that rational processes have become more complex and less systems-determined, in short: creative.
4. Creativity
in poetry
4.1. I shall illustrate my proposals by considering sonnet (nr. 33) by William Shakespeare: (9)
the creativity
of the following
1 Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, 3 Kissing with golden face the meadows green, 4 Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; 5 Anon permit the basest clouds to ride 6 With ugly rack on his celestial face, 7 And from the forlorn world his visage hide, 8 Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace: 9 Even so my sun one early mom did shine 10 With all-triumphant splendour on my brow; 11 But, out, alack! he was but one hour mine, 12 The region cloud hath masked him from me now. 13 Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; 14 Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth. 2
Fig. 1 provides a network representation
of what should be the minimal framework
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instantiated by the text. I have used both actually occurring items (underlined) and non-occurring items needed to establish coherence among the former (in square brackets). I have used the eleven basic proposition types enumerated in 3.3. to label the linking pathways. I believe that both the production of the text and its processing by a reader entail the instantiation of at least minimal core network - plus individual associations that various people would have for concepts such as ‘west’ (a relative term). Most of the pathways are stored in language user’s knowledge of the world as organized in language, but this particular instantiation is unique. I shall retrace the inventive processes involved, disregarding the strong probability that other alternative configurations were previously tried and rejected by the author. 4.2. The author’s plan, which emerges in the last six lines, is to present a complaint about a change in someone’s actions or attitude from ennobling to disgraceful, but also to express the hope for a reconciliation. The duality of this intention exerts strong control upon the selection of items for making the complaint: the author is constrained to avoid direct or drastic accusations, lest reconciliation be made impossible. Shakespeare’s solution is to create elaborate analogies between the person’s actions and some events in nature in such a way that the person could scarcely help feeling flattered. 4.3. The opposition between ennobling and disgraceful behavior calls for a corresponding opposition in the text base. A mental search would be very likely to encounter without much effort the opposition of light to darkness, being so prominent in human experience and so frequently used to represent conflicts by literature of all kinds. Since Shakespeare does not want to represent the person’s actions or attitudes as inherently light or dark, the alternation must be accomplished by shifts in a time continuum: another readily accessible representation drawn from everyday (‘full many a [...I morning’) experience. The earliest period of light is of course the morning, beginning by definition with the sunrise; the earliest subsequent period of darkness would result from the interposition of clouds between the sun and the viewer. Accordingly, the selection of topics we find in the first eight lines of the sonnet is eminently logical and motivated. 4.4. Having begun with the item ‘morning’ with its conventional attribute ‘glorious’ (derived from the sun’s appearance), the author has numerous associations available and selects those which fit the original plan of contrasting nobility (light) with disgrace (dark). Since the sunrise is Ijart of the basic definition of the morning, the derivation of the [sun] node (a part of the sunrise) is sufficiently easy that the term ‘sun’ need not appear in the surface text at all, The items used for depicting the early morning are provided directly from conventional nodes within the ‘sun’frame, such as [motion], [altitude], [color], location in the [sky] (spatial proximtiy), and [light]. The items in the text itself, such as ‘sovereign’, ‘golden’, ‘heavenly’, erc. are drawn from the repertory of poetic discourse at that time - a principle of INTERTEXTUALITY (cf: Kristeva 1968, 1970; Beaugrande 1978~). However it is not only their frequency in poetry that makes these items effective, but also their coherence within the particular text structure here.
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4.5. For motives already suggested, the transition from light to darkness is encompassed by clouds rather than the arrival of night: the capricious, temporary nature of the change is thus thematic. Again, associations stored in real-world knowledge - the ‘cloud’-frame’ - provide items for the text. For instance, the inferior altitude of clouds as opposed to the sun is stressed by the item ‘basest’; the less stimulating appearance of the world by deprival of light supplies the item ‘forlorn’ (sad, but also: forsaken by the sun); and the apparent motion of sun and clouds is described by ‘ride’ and ‘hide’. The verb ‘rack? was commonly applied in Shakespeare’s time to the drifting movement of clouds in the wind. It also suggests the meaning of ‘wreck’ (cf: ‘rack and ruin’), in that the clouds overthrow the sunlight and create an ‘ugly’ sight. 4.6. Although the associations cited so far are largely recoverable from frames of real-world knowledge, the author has also created pathways which are not so recoverable. These pathways, shown by double lines in fig. 1, link the items drawn from nature, such as ‘morning’, ‘clouds’, and ‘sun’, to [person] or [agent] nodes, allowing the assignment of properties and actions which natural objects would not normally have. These intermediary nodes must be created by readers also: for instance, the items ‘flatter’ and ‘eye’ cannot be coherently joined to the ‘morning’ (with which they are syntactically proximate) unless such a [person] node is created. Once the link between ‘morning’ and person is established, the attributes of persons are potentially applicable to the morning; but Shakespeare selects only those attributes which are motivated by his intention, and which are largely accessible from other points in the network as well. Hence, the only physical parts of persons to appear in the text are the ‘eye’ and the ‘face/visage’, which share the feature of roundness with the sun, and, like the latter, are focal areas of a person’s appearance. The action of ‘gilding’ is motivated by the color of the sun; that of ‘kissing’ by the way that sunlight seems to touch objects; that of ‘flatter’ by the favorable semblance that sunlight lends to objects (and the two last actions accord well with the thematic analogy of the ‘morning’ to a person being the object of ‘love’ in line 13). 4.7. The morning can also be envisioned as the state of the world during that period of time. This connection leads to the landscape node, which in turn supplies natural objects by a transition from whole to part. The objects are assigned color properties which complement the color of the sun and indeed change through the intervention of the latter, ‘gilding’ in line 4 being the action of ‘golden’ (line 3) on ‘pale’ (line 4). The effects of the sunny morning on the landscape represent the effects of loving or ennobling actions on the speaker of the text, as becomes clear when the next block of text (lines 9-12) stresses the analogy much more prominently than before. The reader will discover this additional motivation for the selection of items and relations in the first eight lines (especially for the personification of the morning) while processing the later part of the text. This discovery is what makes the text convincing and memorable, not just the mere presence of apparently equivalent, opposed, or discrepant items. 4.8. The lines 9-12 duplicate the network of 1-8 in a simpler version. Kecent
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research in psychology (see especially Kintsch and Vipond) indicates the ability of language users to retain and re-use instantiated propositional networks. A simple pattern match is readily obtained here through obvious recurrences, especially ‘morn’ (9) for ‘morning’ (1). The item ‘heaven’s’ (14) looks back to ‘heavenly’ (4), ‘masked’ (12) to ‘hide’ (7) and ‘stain’ (14) to ‘disgrace’ (8). The time factor of ‘but one hour’ (11) harks back to ‘anon’ (5). The item ‘region’, being a division of the atmosphere as seen in Shakespeare’s day, is easily associated with the [sky] node of the previous network, and ‘splendour’ with [light]. In addition to all this, the connective ‘even so’ (9) explicitly signals that the preceding structure should be re-applied: that syntactic proximity is to be taken as semantic/referential proximity. 4.9. The first network provides more associations than are needed to process the second. For example, the morning is not openly personified again, and the sunlight falls on the speaker’s ‘brow’ rather than on a landscape. However, the reader is invited by recurrences and the connective (‘even so’) to re-apply the entire network, bringing along the extra material still attached. The result is an enrichment of information beyond the similarity of structure and the direct linkings (shown as dotted lines in fig. 1). The possibly offensive terms describing the clouds disgracing the morning are thus applied to the person represented by ‘him’ later on, witlzo~t an actr~l statentenr to that effect. The author has selected a strategy of parallel networks to soften the impact of the complaint and accusation, such that extreme confrontation or offense is not likely. The complexity of the poem is not art for art’s sake, nor an invitation to focus on the ‘message for its own sake’ (cf: 1.13.), but an integral component of the writer’s plan. The elaborate configurations of words simultaneously transform the message and yet impel the reader to recover that message for the sake of successful and complete processing. 4.10. If we regard the text from the standpoint just presented, the act of creativity is revealed as a relatively orderly procedure after all. The enduring greatness of Shakespeare’s poetry rests on his inordinate skill in building dense, mutually interconnected structures of language. Yet even the poem’s function as a message to his friend must have been effective as a reading experience, despite the evident strain upon the personal relationship. The mediation between opposed tendencies: accuse versus excuse, has been impressively accomplished, leaving the initially pessimistic standpoint of lines 1-12 with the optimistic, conciliatory impression of the final couplet. The disgraceful actions of the poem’s implied addressee are shown as either (1) not inherent to his nature, any more than cloudedness pertains to the sun; or (2) forgivable in view of the exalted example seen in the workings of nature. Poetic form, with its multiple node connections, is well suited to mediation between oppositions of all kinds (cf: Koch 1977: 23). 4.11. Roman Jakobson (1960: 358) maintains that “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination”. According to the proposals advanced here, that statement could be recast into the following version: in poetic text production, the selection of text components is subjected to modified controls not usually operative in the normal work-
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ings of participating systems of language and real-world organization in cognition. On the one hand, controls are relaxed upon the mutual compatability of components, allowing for the creation of apparent discrepancies and discontinuities; on the other hand, the resulting constellations of components must evince a discoverable motivation. Hence, a loosening of controls in one area is offset by a proliferation of controls in another: in this sense, a text can be seen as a cybernetic, selfregulatory system in which non-systemic occurrences are regulated by motivated modifications of normal systemic principles. Creativity lies not so much in escaping controls, as in instituting less obvious, more individual and specific controls. For this reason, creativity mediates between systems upheld by convention and the needs of a special communicative situation (e.g. that of Shakespeare addressing his disloyal friend). 4.12. In an earlier study on processing (Beaugrande 1978b) in this same journal, I provided diagrams of sound features and grammatical constructions for a poem. I have neglected those aspects now in favor of clarifying the informational aspect of texts. It is interesting to ask how and at what point informational entities are affixed to specific words and phrases in the surface text. Obviously, the constraints of sound (rime, rhythm) and syntax must be respected along the way. I would assume that the activated networks stored in human knowledge of language and the world carry extremely numerous, mutually accessible nodes, only some of which are encountered and used in search procedures. For example, the information attached to a node varies widely according to the type of proposition, e.g. spatially proximate as opposed to temporally or causally. Unless selectional controls such as frames and schemas were operating, search would become so unwieldy that the production of texts would be extremely slow and/or text organization diffuse to the point of incoherence - both phenomena. being frequently observed in cases of aphasia. The proclivity of frames for interacting with each other must be quite substantial, such that the instantiated nodes can be hooked together rapidly and effectively in discourse. It is reasonable to conclude that stored information in human cognition must contain extensive directives on how that information is to be used much more so than is usually provided for in theories of ‘competence’ as abstract knowledge of rules and lexicon. Depending upon intended use, the information in a given network may appear very differently to the search mechanism [l], greatly reducing time and effort. Here again, the cybernetic precept of self-regulation would apply: the expansion of a structure by admission of further information is controlled by goal-specific search and selection procedures. For example, Shakespeare creates his landscape by gathering items which are spatially proximate in a scene, disregarding such other relations as causal proximity; in contrast, he introduces the topic of light versus darkness by relying on temporal proximity of a day’s changing weather. Although I have not shown any such cases in fig. 1, it is quite
[l] For details, see Collins and Loftus (1975).
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conceivable that a given link might be representative of more than one proposition type: the spatially proximate objects in the landscape share some features (e.g. natural origin) and can participate in part/whole relations (such as a ‘stream’ in the ‘meadows’). Moreover, syntactic proximity has been marked only where it is clearly a dominant linking factor, especially in the non-systemic (double-line) links like that between ‘morning’ and [person]. The control of sound features and grammar upon the selection of items would be a good illustration of added controls imposed in opposition to the relaxed controls of ‘poetic license’ (cf: 4.11.). The aforementioned treatise (Beaugrande 1978b) demonstrates that point very clearly. I would suggest that such controls are applied rather late in text production, after the general information search has delimited the domains eligible for use.
5. Other applications:
creativity
ratings, paradoxes, jokes, and nonsense
5.1. If the account provided for the sonnet is correct, re-examine the samples given in 1.8. above, for example:
we should be able to
(2) The cat sat on the mat. (3) Mat the sat cat the on.
Sample (2) is not creative, since the occurrence of cats sitting on mats is so common in everyday experience that it belongs to the standard organization of reality: the ‘cat’-frame includes direct knowledge of this habitual activity. Similarly, the language material is so fully in accordance with standard grammar that the utterance has been cited countless times by linguists. In contrast, sample (3) is a constellation derived by extremely radical modification of English syntax. Since there is no discoverable motivation, except to demonstrate the chaos resulting from the modification (a purpose of linguists only), the sample is likely to be rejected by most speakers of English: processing would either remain inconclusive or be abandoned right away as hopeless. 5.2. If we turn to the samples (4) though (7), an important factor emerges. As the discussion of the Shakespeare sonnet showed, the motivation for surface constellations is supplied by potentially far-reaching integrative principles and structures. Consequently, there is little point in discussing creativity of isolated sentences, since the motivation might not emerge at all. Doubtless, the preoccupation of many linguists with sentences has hindered the development of a general theory of creativity in the past: a sentence may or may not be grammatical (producible from the system of syntax), but motivation is clearly external to the sentence as an entity (cf: 2.3.) (cf: Beaugrande 1978~). 5.3. Samples (4), (5), and (7) share at least one aspect that sets them apart from sample (2): they address frames and domains of discourse which are not central to
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Fig. 2
’ &I--+
tpAc*t ]
1
Fig. 3
the standard organization of the real-world, but rather peripheral. From the standpoint of language material, the Tennyson excerpt (5) is more system-determined than the others. Few literary scholars would rate Tennyson as being comparable to Milton and Shakespeare in creativity. Even these admittedly brief, incomplete samples suggest why. A diagram (fig. 2) for the Milton excerpt: (4) Thee, chantress, oft the woods among I woo to hear thy evensong
shows a number of creative modifications: the personification of the nightengale (addressed in the same poem just before as ‘Philomel’) as a woman whose song must be ‘wooed’ from her, the creation of a structure in ‘EVENsong’ that matches that of the non-occurring [NIGHTengale] (the upper case/lower case distinction is used here and in fig. 3 to show access to a part of a word), and the resulting constellation of time markers. In the Shakespeare sample (fig. 3): (7) To this I witness call the fools of time Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime
we find a still more complexly developed time node dominating the entire structure: the folly of the ‘fools’ lies in their mismanagement of ‘time’ [2]. The Shakespeare sample shows a remarkable balancing of antonyms that draws the network [ 21 I am uncertain if ‘time’ is a property of the ‘fools’ or shares with the latter the feature of passing away. An earlier line of the sonnet: ‘As subject to Time’s love or to Time’s hate’, indicates that time is itself personified; but why is there no capitalization in the lines cited as sample (7)?
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Fig. 4
Cilfilhn -Rev.George ---
[email protected] --
of
Lhmdee
Fig. 5
together with extreme coherence: especially striking is the syntactic proximity of ‘WITnesses’ whose WISdom derives from their folly, and ‘fools’. The double opposition ‘die/lived’ and ‘goodness/crime’ is equally motivated and persuasive. In contrast, the Tennyson sample (Fig. 4) [3]: (5) The splendour falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in story
reveals no distinctly non-systemic pathways; instead, the assignment of relations between elements is decidedly conventional. While I shall not analyse the whole of these texts, the impression obtained here that Shakespeare is more creative than Milton, and both of them more so than Tennyson, would be confirmed by such a complete analysis. Still lower ratings go to the poem whose lines (6) Rev. George Cilfillan of Dundee, I must conclude my muse And to write in praise of thee my pen does not refuse
show fully systems-contolled linking (fig. 5). A telling instance is the phrase ‘Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee’ that might be a postal address, rather than a poetic apostrophe. The fact that the author’s ‘pen does not refuse’ is nugatory - otherwise there would be no text at all. Paul Werth (1976) has shown that an evaluation of this poem with sole reference to surface equivalences and recurrences yields strikingly similar results to the evaluation of a Shakespeare sonnet as analysed by Jakobson and Jones (1970). The reason for that surprising result is that many equivalences and recurrences are systems-determined, so that their presence is no indicator [3] I give at least the entire sentence, rather ilar to The cat sat on the mat’ (cf: 1.8.).
than the shorter
version
that is structurally
so sim-
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of creativity or literary merit. The solution, in my view, is to base evaluation upon relations - including, among others, equivalences and recurrences - derived by modification of systems, and thus to discover the motivation as well as the enrichment entailed in modification. 5.4. Few non-systemic linkages are more noticeable than the paradox. The assertion that something is equivalent in some way to its own opposite powerfully motivates the hearer/reader to recreate pathways which resolve the discrepancy. When Oscar Wilde (1966: 40) has Lord Henry remark: (10) Philanthropic
people lose all sense of humanity.
it becomes necessary to construct (i) (ii) (iii) (iv)
It is their distinguishing characteristic.
some such chain of reasoning as this:
Philanthropic people are determined to do good deeds. Their determination leads them to force their plans upon others. Such force can become inhumane. Therefore, philanthropic people are devoid of humanity.
5.5. The amusement which Wildean paradoxes elicit (and many other types of jokes as well) is derived partly from a release of tension through creating a resolution to an extreme discrepancy, and partly from recognizing a corresponding discrepancy in the real world: here, that human acts are pursued in an inhumane manner. When Lord Henry observes (Wilde 1966: 33) that (11) The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that a caprice lasts longer
the solution of the time-dependent paradox leads to the enriching or amusing insight that the expansive declarations of passion regularly fail to match the actual duration of the emotional excitation. Arthur Koestler (1964: 33) cites a traditional joke which illustrates the point just made: (12) Chamfort tells a story of a Marquis at the court of Louis XIV who, on entering his wife’s boudoir and finding her in the arms of a Bishop, walked calmly to the window and went through the motions of blessing the people in the street. “What are you doing?” cried the anguished wife. “Monseigneur is performing my functions,** replied the Marquis, “so I am performing his.”
Here, the resolution of the discrepancy - or better, the discontinuity [4] - in the husband’ s behavior depends on the discrepancy of the behavior of the churchman, who, according to social systems, should be chaste: the second anomaly cancels or balances out the first. The effect of the joke lies not only in the release of taboo [4] A discrepancy of occurrences.
is a mismatch of data patterns,
and a discontinuity
is a gap ln a progression
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against the specific topic or actions entailed, as Freud supposed (cf: Koestler ibid.). The matching of linguistic or narrative discrepancies and discontinuities to discrepancies and discontinuities in the real world is always enriching, and very often amusing, irrespective of topic. 5.6. Another extreme and revealing manifestation of creativity is in so-called ‘nonsense’ texts. Here is a famous sample by Lewis Carroll (1960: 191): (13)
‘Twas brillig, and the slithy tovcs Did pyre and pimblc in the wabc: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the momc raths outgrabc
This text originally appeared as a ‘Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry’ in the journal in 1855. Later, it was used as the opening part of a longer text entitled ‘Jabberwocky’ in the novel Tlzrough the Looking-Glass (first edition 1871). I shall treat the text here as independent, in agreement with its first inception and publication. 5.7. In this sample, creativity is manifested in the addition of new elements to the system of the English lexicon (cf: 2.2. (i)). The result appears at first nonsensical, that is: random or arbitrary with respect to systems of meaning. But a closer inspection, including the author’s own account of the text (Carroll 1960: 270-72), reveals that such is by no means the case: the creation of the new elements has in fact been substantially controlled by the very systems of English that appear to be defied. First, the phonological properties of the new elements result in allowable phonemic sequences for English. In many cases, those properties are derived from conventional items supplying the components of meaning: .‘brillig’ from ‘broiling’ (whence: the time of day when one ‘broils’ things for dinner), ‘gyre’ from ‘gyroscope’ (whence: to revolve like a gyroscope) [S], and ‘gimble’ from ‘gimlet’ (whence: to make holes like a gimlet). Moreover, ‘mimsy’ is formed by assembling the first and last parts of two words: ‘miserable’ and ‘flimsy’; ‘slithy’ contains the first and last parts of one word, and the middle of another: ‘slimy’ and ‘lithe’; and ‘mome’ has the latter part of one word affixed to the middle and end of another: ‘from home’ (all derivations given in Carroll 1960: 270-72). Phonological control is exerted also by the demands of rime (‘toves/borogoves’, ‘wabe/outgrabe’) and alliteration (‘gyre/gimble’ [6], ‘mimsy/mome’). 5.8. Conformity to the morphological system of English is observable in the adjectival ending ‘-y’ of ‘slithy’ and ‘mimsy’, the plural ending ‘-s’ of ‘toves’, ‘borogoves’, and ‘raths’, the prefix ‘out-’ and even the vowel shift of ‘outgrabe’ (exMisch-M~s~l~
[ 51 The Oxford English Dictionary lists ‘gyrc’ as a word, documented since 1420, meaning to whirl around. But the OED listings for some other words here, such as ‘_tiblc’ (a pivoted ring), ‘mimsy’ (prudish), and ‘slithy’ (slovenly) do not match the account provided by Carroll. [6] In the 1896 preface (1966: 171), the author insists on this alliteration, despite the dcrivation of the words.
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plained as the past tense of ‘outgribe’). The importance of the phonological and morphological constraints in creation of lexical items becomes manifest when we consider that a text disregarding such constraints would be unacceptable to most speakers of English: (14) ‘Twas rbillgl and the lsthiym tvoez
Did rgyye and mbimlb in the bwaee: All mmyis were the brgovrovgrvoez, And the moom thrsa ougtrbaee.
5.9. The selection of semantic material for the new items is also controlled. The derivational proximity (marked as an additional proposition type with the number 12 in fig. 6) of some items, e.g. ‘slithy’ or ‘gyre’, to conventional items of the English lexicon restricts the search domain for items in general. The properties of being ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy’ lead the author to assign to the ‘toves’ some features of lizards and badgers; the addition of corkscrews to this composite animal results from the derivations of the actions ‘gyre’ and ‘gimble’ (on this and other definitions see again Carroll 1960: 270-72). The establishment of ‘toves’ as a composite animal exerts attraction upon the ‘borogoves’, another animal combining features of animate and inanimate entities. Since the derivation of ‘mimsy’ commits the ‘borogoves’ to being ‘flimsy’, their being long-legged birds ‘like a live mop’ is a logical choice; their misery is depicted by shabbiness, and attribute also easily assignable to a used mop. As I have tried to show in fig. 6, there is a number of pathways linking the seemingly arbitrary information assigned by Carroll in his text. Since ‘brillig’ is a time of day, the inclusion of a sundial in the definition of ‘wabe’ (the ‘plot of grass around a sundial’) is motivated, the more so since ‘toves’ are said to make their nests under sundials. The plot of grass suggests itself as a suitable place for animal activities, especially such space-consuming ones as ‘gyring’. The green color of the grass is transferred to the ‘raths’ as ‘green pigs’. The action of ‘outgribing’ is constrained to being some kind of ‘outcry’ by similarity of form and sound, its distressful nature being due to the fact that the ‘raths’ are lost. The phonemic material of the word ‘outgribe’ suggests the outward vehemence and stridency of ‘bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle’. 5.20. The information network of the Carroll text, illustrated in fig. 6, differs from that of the previously discussed texts in one important way. In most texts, the non-occurring propositions are easily inferred during processing (in such operations as “understanding, question answering, problem solving, recall and recognition”; cf: Kintsch and van Dijk 1978: 64). In this text, the author himself has had recourse to a commentary, supplying some of the intermediary propositional nodes which make the text a coherent structure. The point of the foregoing discussion, however, is to suggest that Carroll’s discovery procedures for that intermediary material were marked only by relative, rather than absolute freedom. The coherence of texts is such a strong principle of control that it asserts itself even when language users set out to defy it. Notice here the tendency of the source items
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d
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for neologisms to share features and properties: both badgers and corkscrews drill holes; both badgers and lizards are slimy; whistling, bellowing and sneezing all entail the forceful emission of air with a noticeable sound. 5.11. It is of course possible to consciously work against coherence and toward randomness, as demonstrated by the poetry of Gertrude Stein. But the result is that the texts so produced are dull to the point of unreadability, because the reader experience of discovering the motivation for the texts’ formation is blocked or made sterile. A borderline case is presented by Joyce’s Finnegan’s W&e. In that work, the very numerous neologisms are derived in a manner not unlike Carroll’s, by pasting word components together, except that other languages besides English are used. Thus the reader is confronted with a bewilderingly rich potential for discovery, but with such high demands upon effort and concentration that processing continually threatens to break down. So many systems are being modified in rapid succession that a point of orientation remains elusive.
6. Narrative structures 6.1. A narrative can be viewed as a network of states with transitions forming the links. These links are, in standard narratives, very often derived from spatial, temporal, or causal proximity. Yet we find remarkably few enduring narratives in which all links conform to these types with a maximum of directness and systematic logic. Instead, we nearly always find at least some nonexpected links, some transitions to unforseen states. If the theory advanced here so far is applicable, then such states must be nonetheless derivable from the structure of the narrative in a motivated and discoverable fashion. Here, the differences between proposition types is crucial: given a state, one can proceed to numerous alternative subsequent states, depending upon the type of linking one selects. It follows that narratives, like texts in general, are produced by selection among competing alternatives with greater of lesser probability values. When a comparatively improbable alternative is chosen, the transition provides a high information value, in agreement with the classic definition of information of Shannon and Weaver (1949). Yet if the narrative is well-constructed, even improbable states cannot be inserted at random: instead, they must be derivable by alternative pathways which the reader had overlooked or perceived only marginally. For example, mystery stories draw their effects from the fact that the pathways which will eventually lead to the solution are presented by the narrator only in a scattering of clues. The tension felt by the reader arises from attempting to anticipate the solution pathway while knowing that this task has been made deliberately difficult. The narrator often misleads the reader by following a non-solution pathway with some emphasis, until suddenly, a discontinuity appears that requires a different pathway (obvious device: the presumed murderer is murdered himself). The discontinuity triggers a process of “backward interpretation” (Rieser 1978: IS) which can be compared to backward
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chaining in general problem solving by computer (see Winston 1977: 135-36): given a goal state, pathways to an accessible initial state are tested. 6.2. Our reactions to narratives resemble in this aspect our mode of dealing with events in everyday life. If we are unexpectedly arrested, our response is to backtrack furiously in search of some past event or action which could supply the motivation for such an occurrence. Our reaction would be similar in cases of sudden good fortune, such as the acquisition of a large sum of money we could not recall having earned. We are socially committed to the credo that links such as those enumerated in 3.3. obtain between objects and events, rather than purely fortuitious concatenations of random coincidences. While we are occasionally compelled to admit the latter perspective in life, we tend to reject its use in narratives. We tend to postulate and apply systemic entities, such as frames and schemas as coherencecreating networks, in the normal course of things, simply because failure to do so would rapidly overload processing abilities (cf: 3.5.). Erving Goffman (1974) has assembled entertaining instances of the anomalies which this tendency can occasion in social interaction. 6.3. If the foregoing remarks are accurate, the structure of narratives is a revealing source for studying the social organization of a culture, as will be shown in detail elsewhere (Beaugrande and Colby 1979). For the purposes of the present discussion, narrative creativity can be defied as the creation of motivated discontinuity within a sequence of events. In the joke about the Marquis and the Bishop (sample (11) in SS.), the discontinuity appears in the husband’s unexpected response to the infidelity of his wife: rather than falling into a fit of rage and accusation, he commences a seemingly unrelated activity. The joke is effective because this activity is discovered to be a subtle revenge after all: by performing the duties of the Bishop, the Marquis proclaims how far the Bishop has strayed from his own duty in another sense. The effect is intensified by the extreme distance between the Marquis’ reaction and that considered normal in western society, making the discovery later on all the more rewarding: systems of conduct are defied, only to be confirmed after all. 6.4. It is worth considering how the apparent chaos of narrative sequencing in the novels of Lewis Carroll is in fact controlled by the application of several relatively consistent principles in varying configurations of dominance. Despite their radical creativity, these novels still rest upon the important base of INTERTEXTUALITY: the management of texts by reference to antecedent texts, and INTERSITUATIONALITY: the management of situations by reference to corresponding situations in social reality (on the application of these concepts to dialogue interaction, see Beaugrande 1979). I surmise that the lasting appeal of Carroll’s novels rests precisely upon the way in which narrative and textual discrepancies reveal discrepancies in social reality. 6.5. One principle of modification, more developed in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland than in Zkough the Looking-Glass (both in Carroll 1960), derives from a perspective which, though stable for adults, is unstable for children: the rela-
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tive size of objects. The sudden changes of the protagonist’s size in Alice’s Advenfzrres repeatedly divert the narrative sequence into otherwise inaccessible pathways. In the trial scene, the increasing freedom with which Alice interferes in the court’s proceedings (Carroll 1960: 156-61) provides an entertaining representation of a real world discrepancy: the impunity of the powerful before the supposed equality of the law. The modification of physical relationships offers insights into disproportions of social organization. Motives are similar for making Alice somewhat smaller - in the ratio of child to adult human - than characters whose natural size would be extremely varied: a dodo, a frog, a hare, a turtle, figures on playing cards, chess pieces, flowers, a goat, a sheep, a lion, and a unicorn. This size ratio is motivated by the author’s plan to dwell, in a revealingly radical manner, upon the patronizing and belittling practised in his time on children by society. The contributions of this plan to the action and dialogue of both novels are extremely substantial. For instance, Alice is asked to recite lessons or answer pedantic questions (e.g. by the caterpillar, the gryphon, and the two chess queens). She is given advice on manners by characters whose own manners are alarmingly deficient. Negative comments are directed against Alice’s personal appearance (e.g. by the Hatter, the Tiger-lily, and Humpty-Dumpty); Humpty-Dumpty even finds severe criticism for such features as Alice’s name, age, and facial arrangement (pp. 263, 266, 276). While these manifestations are extreme on the surface, they have definite counterparts in social systems. 6.6. Size shifts within the novels or between the real world and the text world can therefore be described as a creative strategy with diverse manifestations. I shall enumerate some additional strategies and their contributions to the text. 6.6.1. A selection of human features is assigned to non-human entities to create characters in both novels. Shifts from the human domain to the non-human one supply interesting discontinuties. For instance, the playing-card characters of the first book can suddenly revert to their original status: (15) “And who around the their backs or soldiers,
are these?” said the Queen, pointing to the three gardeners who were lying rose tree; for, you see, as they were lying on their faces, and the pattern on was the same as the rest of the pack, she could not tell if they were gardeners, or courtiers, or three of her own children. (pp. 108-09)
Here, the basic equality of humans is manifested on one side (the back), while the distinguishing marks that decide rank and privilege are on a completely separate side; the Queen’s demand for those marks is presented in an amusingly disparate perspective. An intriguing comment upon complexities of table manners is engineered by a sudden shift from non-human to human status: (16) And the waiters set a leg of mutton before Alice, who looked at it rather anxiously, as she had never had to carve a joint before. “You look a little shy: let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,” said the Red Queen. “Alice - Mutton: Mutton - Alice.” The leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice. (p. 331)
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Since shifts of this kind become a familiar structure, it is not surprising when Alice herself is treated as non-human, for instance: as a serpent (p. 75) a flower (pp. 301-04), and even ‘a fabulous monster’ (p . 288). In these episodes, the self-image of humans as an exclusive, higher species is undercut. 6.6.2. When models of humans used in games are animated as characters, the rules of the respective games influence the narrative. The ranks of the card courtiers match their values in card games. The chess queens run faster than everyone else (pp. 208-10, 245, 286) by virtue of their unlimited moves in chess. The clumsiness of the knights stems from the irregular patterns of their moves in the chess game: (17) she watched the horse walking leisurely along the road. and the Knight tumbling off, fist
on one side and then on the other. (p. 134)
The rules of the chess game are applied to the narrative in a very eccentric way. For instance, the presence of the Red Queen at the banquet places the White King in check (cf: Gardner’s notes in Carroll 1960: 317), but the proper response is not forthcoming right away. The game is only one strategy for organizing the narrative, and its exigencies are given low priority when other strategies are dominant. 6.6.3. Some characters are created from animals appearing on coats of arms. The gryphon is the emblem on the crest of Trinity College at Oxford, where CarroIl lived. The lion and the unicorn appear on the respective coats of arms of England and Scotland. This source is rather unproductive (in contrast to the game source). The gryphon remains a sketchy character, while the lion and the unicorn are depicted largely with respect to their rivalry due to another source. 6.6.4. That source is the enactment of nursery rimes, an application of the concept of intertextuality (cf: 6.4.). The fultillment of the demands of the nursery rimes is treated as obligatory, but the author derives many additional details by inference. The similarity of names leads to the depiction of Tweedledee and Tweedledum as identical twins; their alleged willingness to tight over a rattle provides the basis for their being small, immature boys of excitable temperament. Ahce quite naturally treats them as schoolboys (p. 231). In the same line of reasoning, Humpty-Dumpty’s faII as asserted in the well-known rime suggests a proud disposition before the accident, and that is just how Carroll portrays him (p. 264). A line from another rime (‘The Lion beat the Unicorn all round the town’ p. 283) is worked into an ingenious exchange of dialogue in which the beleaguered White King averts a quarrel between the Lion and the Unicorn: (18) “Why, I beat you all round the town, you chicken !” the Lion replied angrily, half getting up as he spoke. Here the King interrupted to prevent the quarrel going on: he was very nervous, and his voice quite quivered. “All round the town?” he said. “That’s a good long way. Did you go by the old bridge, or by the market-place? You get the best view by the old bridge.” (p. 28%
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The nursery rimes are a major point of orientation, but their dominance is naturally episodic. 6.6.5. Standing phrases of English are tapped for narrative material. The personnel for the ‘mad tea party’ is recruited from the phrases ‘mad as a hatter’ and ‘mad as a March hare’. The saying ‘to grin like a Cheshire cat’ furnished another character. The Mock Turtle is a back-formation from mock turtle soup, which is made from veal; hence, he is drawn as having the head, hind feet, and tail of a calf. His morose temperament is due to not being a ‘real turtle’ (p. 126) and to anticipating the fate of being made into soup (p. 141). 6.6.6. Two of the proposition types listed in 3.3. were ‘is a synonym’ and ‘is an antonym’. There is evidently a strong, easily recoverable link between opposites possibly due to right and left hemisphericity of the brain (cf: TenHouten and Kaplan 1973). The mirror imagery introduced in the first chapter of 7kortgh the Looking-Glass supplies a strategy of reversal applied sporadically to various proposition types throughout the book. Temporal organization is reversed when the White Queen cries out before hurting her finger (pp. 249-50), and when Alice has to pass the cake around first and cut it up afterwards (p. 290). Spatial organization with respect to motion is reversed in Alice’s attempts to escape from her house to a nearby hill - a creative enactment of the child’s thwarted tendency to flee domestic confinement provides the motivation here (pp. 199-205). A solution is found when it occurs to Alice to try walking backwards, whereupon she immediately attains her goal. Later, swift running only results in staying in the same place (pp. 208-10). Sometimes causal connections are turned around, as when dry biscuits (p. 211) and dry bread (p. 285) are offered for quenching thirst. These reversals are definable with respect to the standard organization of reality. But at one point, the Red Queen states that opposites are relative: placed in other contexts, a garden becomes a wilderness, a hill a valley, and nonsense ‘sensible as a dictionary’ (pp. 206-07). Alice is unable to accept this notion, and insists that the result ‘would be nonsense’. It is significant that reversals are not maintained consistently in the novel, and if they were, the narrative might become extremely difficult to organize, both for the author and the reader. Instead, reversal is kept as an available option for generating non-expected transitions between events and objects, and becomes dominant only when other strategies, such as the enactment of nursery rimes, would not be unduly disrupted. 6.6.7. Dialogue is produced by unconventional linking procedures between utterances. Very prominent is punning, in which phonemic proximity is equated with semantic proximity: (19) “Can you answer useful questions?” she said. “How is bread made?” “I know that!” Alice cried eagerly. “You take some flour-” “Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen asked. “In a garden or in the hedges?” “Well, it isn’t picked at all,” Alice explained: “it’s ground-” “How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen. “You mustn’t leave out so many things.” (p. 322)
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Such dialogue is not nonsensical however, since there are still discoverable, albeit unconventional links. The strategy of parody is very strong, especially in the verses recited throughout both books. Again, it must be stressed that parody derives its effect from modification. The motivation lies in the generally heavy didactic tone of the originals, such as ‘How doth the busy little bee’ (parodied as ‘How doth the little crocodile’, p. 38) and ‘Tis the voice of the sluggard’ (parodied as ‘Tis the voice of the lobster’, p. 139), both by Isaac Watts, and ‘You are old, Father William’ (parodied on pp. 70-71) by Robert Southey; or in their overdone sentimentality, such as ‘Beautiful Star’ (which becomes ‘Beautiful Soup’ on p. 141) by James Sayles, and ‘Speak gently!’ (which becomes ‘Speak roughly’, p. 85) by David Bates. The nature of such verse, whose memorization was commonly forced upon children in Victorian times, becomes starkly evident through Carroll’s parodies, which have outlived their originals. 6.7. The creative strategies cited above not only determine the surface features of the narrative. Their recurrent and internally consistent use also guides reader response, such that the text is not experienced as chaotic. The reader soon becomes aware of the underlying strategies and can discover how the elements of the narrative were derived from conventional elements; at the same time, the potentially absurd nature of those conventions begins to emerge. Here, the Red Queen’s remarks upon the relativity of nonsense assume far-reaching significance. The creativity of the artist and the child, both of whom are not committed to established systems, converge so persuasively that readers of all ages and backgrounds are able to gain awareness of alternatives to accepted conditions of cognition, expression, and interaction. 6.8. Various commentators, ranging from Wilson (1932) to Reichert (1974), have stressed the relationship between Carroll’s fictional writings and his interest in formal logic. The White Knight’s quibbles on the name of a song (p. 306) are a noticeable illustration of a logical dispute about metalanguages. Humpty-Dumpty reverses natural language semantics by insisting that people’s names must have independent meaning (p. 263), while other words can have any meaning he assigns to them (pp. 268-70), and his position is suggestive of such philosophical trends as nominalism. However, recourse to Carroll’s logical training can be misleading in that it gives a narrow interpretation of a more general phenomenon. If creativity is, as I have proposed, the act of constructing propositions not determined by standard systems, it is an inherently logic-based activity, irrespective of one’s individual training and interests. Of course, such a logic is more general and flexible than most of the widely used logics.
7. Fictionality 7.1. The proposals advanced so far may shed some light on the disputes about fictionality, a traditional bone of contention among logicians and philosophers. A
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well-known viewpoint is that statements are true only if the objects they name are presumed to exist: the ‘existential presupposition’ must be fulfilled. From this standpoint, fictional texts would be simply false, as Bertrand Russel would presumably conclude, or neither true nor false (the position of Frege and Strawson). These assertions, derived from positivism, lead to such judgments 3s that of Willard Quine (1960) that there is no point in attempting to determine the truth value of fictional texts by empiric observation. Quine’s dictum does not explain why fiction is nonetheless relevant to empiric reality. 7.2. One hopes that the worst excesses of positivism are a thing of the past. One indicator is the renewed interest in the issue of tictionahty within recent years. Some researchers have called attention to the possibility of signals which mark texts as fictional. Inspired by the transformationalist proclivity for abstract ‘features’ and ‘markers’, several linguists have proposed a marker of [? Fiction], though the status of the marker remains unclear (see Wunderlich 1970: 101; Baumgartner 1971: 745f.; Ihwe 1972: 210ff.). Others have emphasized the pragmatic aspects of fictionality, such as the author’s “illocutionary stance” (Searle 1975: 325) and the “social estimation of the role of a type of discourse in the ensemble of literary communication” (Schmidt 1975: 69, my translation). It seems clear that the ability to deal with fictionality is proportionate to the breadth of linguistic approaches. Searle is unwilling to admit surface markers (1975: 325): “There is no textual property, syntactic or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction”. Gale (1971: 336) agrees with Searle’s concept of “illocutionary stance”, but also considers “explicit fictive illocutionary indicators”. Harald Weinrich, in his celebrated treatise on lying (1966), mentions “signals”, but makes his definition dependent upon a discrepancy between the speaker/writer’s mental representation and the representation given in language. 7.3. I am inclined to regard Weinrich’s proposal as the most insightful, and, despite its comparatively early date, the most modern. Pursuing a similar direction, Teun van Dijk (1972a: 337) believes that readers “match the semantic structure of the text with the cognitive structure of [their] knowledge about reality’*. I have stated above (3.2.) that the processing of objects and events being encountered is an act of pattern-matching. I assume that both world knowledge and language knowledge are stored in network form, so that mental and linguistic representations are available in the same notation. Obviously, a perfect match between all nodes of stored knowledge and all nodes of a text is hardly likely. Therefore, language users must have what I shall call a PRIMARY THRESHOLD for determining when a given occurrence is to be accepted as an instantiation of an object or event as stored in mental representation. The tictionality of texts by no means suspends this matching process, despite such assertions as that of Gottfried Gabriel (1975: 38) that fictional texts “speak of no objects at all” (my translation). Instead, we should postulate SECONDARY THRESHOLDS which evaluate the relevance of the material that has passed the primary threshold with respect to further decisions concerning the input. I would suggest that fictionality is decided by such a secondary thres-
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hold: a presentation is accepted as an instantiation. but not as one occurring or likely to occur in the real world. For example, Don Quixote is accepted as an instantiation of ‘Spanish country gentleman’, but his features show enough discrepancy vis-ci-vis the normal representation of that concept that he is marked as a fictional instance. The occurrence of actual places and objects known to be part of the real world at that time (e.g., a cave or a tavern) does not conflict with such a judgment: the match of those plates is so good that the presentation passes the secondary threshold, while the narrative’s protagonist does not. In terms of propositions, the primary threshold assigns the proposition ‘x is an instantiation ofv’, where x is a presented object or event and y a stored representation; the secondary threshold assigns the proposition ‘X is an instantiation ofy in the real world’. 7.4. In support of this viewpoint, I would cite a curious phenomenon that attends upon literary and fictional texts again and again. I argued above (3.5.) that it is disturbing for readers to terminate processing at an incomplete stage. If processing is indeed pattern-matching, it follows that readers would seek to gain more material if a match seems inconclusive. Specifically, they would ask questions of the author or about the author’s situation while writing in order to decide if this information supports a sufficiently good match to pass the secondary threshold. And time and time again, readers have responded to fictional texts in precisely this way, and a major branch of literary studies has been concerned with mediating information of this very kind. Authors may complain that such a response is inappropriate and indeed an invasion of privacy; but it may well be an outgrowth of basic human processing activities. 7.5. Working on the foundations of systems theory as set forth especially by Niklas Luhmann (1968, 1970), Wolfgang Iser has drawn conclusions similar to my own. He notes (1975: 277) that the traditional view of fiction as the opposite end of the scale from fact is inaccurate; the proper location of the fictional text is directly along the boundaries of the model of reality (1975: 303). Accordingly, he rejects the popular concepts of ‘reflection’ (?‘iederspiegelclrzg) and ‘deviation’ (Abrveichung) and defines the relationship between the text and the model of reality as one of interaction. His view (1975: 302) that this model of reality is composed of systems of meaning, and that the text is itself a meaning-creating system that both stabilizes and interferes with the established systems of meaning, is fully compatible with the results I have presented. 7.6. My definition of fictionality as a set of propositions assigned to input by a secondary threshold sheds some light on that otherwise mysterious marker [? Fiction] envisioned by some linguists (see 7.2.). The fact that fictional texts CCZIIZ refer to real objects and events is no longer a troublesome problem (cf: Gale 1971: 324; Ihwe 1977: 17f.; Beaugrande 1977). My proposal also agrees with Hans Reichenbath’s (1966: 282) condition that “the laws expressed by the behavior of the fictitious persons play an important role in our own lives and therefore help US to understand human behavior in general”. Moreover, we escape the difficult if not unsolvable problem of attempting to correlate “fictive existence” with actual “physi-
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cal existence” (cf: Ihwe 1977: 38ff.) by some independent standards (outside systems of meaning). Of course, the borderline between fiction and ‘reality’ may not be as clear-cut as logicians would want it to be for the purposes of assigning a ‘truth value’ unambiguously, because contextual factors must be admitted. But this issue touches upon a crucial distinction between logic vs. natural language: in the latter, decisions must be made on the basis of much more complex information than is usually representable in such standard tools of logic as two-dimensional truth tables. I already remarked (in 3.1.) for similar reasons that network representation is more workable and psychologically more plausible than ordered n-tuples. Nonetheless, I surmise that creativity, like many other aspects of language use, is a logicbased activity, if we envision logic as a general methodology for systematically organizing and connecting semantic entities in all kinds of systems and structures.
8. Outlook:
can creativity be impaired?
8.1. In closing, I would suggest that the proposals advanced in the paper may have implications for domains in which creativity is desirable but has not, to my knowledge, been made available so far in the form of explicit procedures. One domain of this kind is clearly education. Here such questions as these could be pursued: X1.1. At what age and how do children acquire frames and schemas for managing mental processes? Walter Kintsch (1977) noted that already at the age of four, children use schemas for understanding a story presented as a series of pictures. 8.1.2. At what age can children integrate non-expected material and discover its relevance? Instead of presenting scrambled stories as Kintsch did, one can insert a narrative discontinuity with recoverable motivation. Important insights into the development of reasoning powers (e.g. inference-making) can be obtained. 81.3. What activities can be used to encourage creativity in children? One could ask children to (1) describe with language a scene or situation with respect to how its components are related (i.e., coherent), (2) modify the scene or situation, and (3) describe what can be learned by contrasting the original with the modified version. The children could also insert discontinuities into stories and describe the result. 8.1.4. What types of texts are suitable for promoting learning at the various levels of schooling? Insights gained from such experiments as cited in 8.1.1. and 8.1.2. would clarify the children’s aptitude levels; text analysis such as the diagramming procedures I have demonstrated in this paper could serve to match texts with aptitude levels. 8.1.5. How can writing maturity and readability be measured? I would suggest that the procedures of text analysis shown here can be used to measure these two variables. Immature writing would (1) show conventional, obvious linking, leading
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to triteness; (2) show a scattering of linking types (cf: 3.3.) without motivation or control by a plan; and (3) show juxtaposed elements without discoverable links among them, resulting in incoherence. Readability would be an issue concerning the planning of the network: conventional associations guarantee understanding, while some motivated, but nonconventional associations guarantee interest. Readability would of course have to be relative to reader aptitude (cf: 8.1.4.), a factor all too often disregarded in absence of explicit measurement techniques. 8.1.6. Do traditional classroom activities promote or discourage creativity? Only in a few instances is a definitive answer possible; for example the memorization of poetry is decidedly noncreative. In most instances, the methods used make the difference in this respect. Literature can be taught as workshop in observing creative techniques [7], so that the frequent gap between literary studies and writing training would diminish.‘For writing, the explicit proposition types cited in 3.3. serve to make students aware of the channels for discovering material and making it coherent, as opposed to relying upon intuitions. The concept of creativity as a nonsystemic pathway would be a useful starting point for experimentation. Thus, writing assignments could be undertaken with specific procedures, while reading assignments would be subsumed under the same priorities, namely observing and appreciating those procedures. The mutual applicability of insights could have a substantial improvement in motivation as well as in performance for both areas. 8.2. Another domain of application would be computer creativity. Most language understanding and generating programs in artificial intelligence now operating rely heavily on frames and schemas of various types (cf: Schank and Abelson 1977; Beaugrande 1978~). It would be worth investigating if a program could be set up to create non-systemic pathways and evaluate the possible motivations. A program for writing poetry would demand interactive search capabilities that would take account of not only conceptual structures, but sound structures and lexical alternatives as well. For generating creative narratives, the evaluation of inserted discontinuities could be simulated by backward chaining in problem solving, with restart at a node accessible from a previously disattended, but recoverable or reconstructable pathway. Story-writing programs such as that of James Meehan (1976) and Sheldon Klein et al. (1973) might be able to attain an element of reader interest that is now lacking. For example, Klein’s murder mystery program might be able to introduce both the crime and its solution in such a way as to surprise the reader (cf: 6.1.). 8.3. At this time, the usefulness of such outlooks as I have sketched can only be appraised in absence of implementation. In the meantime, I would submit that substantial research in psychology and computer science now accruing does SUPport the supposition that a general theory of creativity might reasonably have the format I have advocated here.
[ 71
For an illustration, cf: Beaugrande 1978d.
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Roberf-Akin de Bcaugrande (b. 1946) studied Romance Philology at the L’niversity of Vienna. German literature and Philosophy at the University of Hcidclberg, French Language and Literaturc at the University of Paris (Sorbonnc), and German literature and historical philology at the Fret University of Berlin, completing the Master of Arts degree thcrc in 1971. Following furthcr work in literary theory, translation theory, and text linguistics, he took the Ph.D. Degree in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine in 1976. In the book Fuctors in u theory of poetic translating (Asscn, 1978), he has proposed a model of translation theory based on reception aesthetics (Jauss, Her, S.J. Schmidt, Wienold, W.A. Koch, van Dijk, Ihwe). In Introduction to text Iinguisfics (London, Tiibingen, 1980). co-authored with Wolfgang Dressier, he provides a survey of research on text linguistics and an outlook on future trends. In numerous articles appearing in journals such as College Composition and Communication, he has suggested that research of the kinds already mentioned can serve to organize languagerelated tasks in education: composition, technical writing, second language acquisition, and literary studies. Robert de Beaugrande currently teaches English at the University of Florida, Gainesville and linguistics at the University of Bielefeld, Germany.