25
25
Towards a New Definition of Creativity
Prokofiev's verbal jab at Stravinsky's historicism (chap. 24), probably as much the unfortunate result of professional rivalry as a case of the pot calling the kettle black, is an important reminder that the very concept and nature of creativity remain poorly defined and little understood, even by those held to be creative in the highest degree. In his fascinating book, Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, Howard Gardner seems to have difficulty resolving a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, he accepts the modernist position that breaking with the past—conspicuous innovation—is the touchstone of creativity:
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The creative individual is a person who regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting.1
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On the other hand, he demonstrates that a significant portion of the creative output of artists identified as great innovators actually grew directly out of their engagement with the past.
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And here, I think, we encounter the way in which the modern era was not as modern as its apostles believed. While desperately hoping to overthrow the burdens of the past, the seven modern masters were in fact steeped in that past—be it religious, historical, traditional, academic, or some combination thereof.2
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In the end Gardner is unable to elucidate how such ostensibly ambivalent attitudes towards yesterday manage to generate the spark of creative genius today, and falls back on a sort of quasi-Hegelian dialectic which reaffirms his modernist bias:
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Rather than proceeding indefinitely in the direction of greater openness, tolerance, or blurring of genres, human beings may be condemned to oscillate back and forth between periods of innovation and tradition, between modernism and historicism, between creative breakthroughs and periods of stasis or regression that may result in tribal destructiveness. A modern spirit à la 1900 may be as far as human beings are capable of venturing, and perhaps they can only reside in that bracing region of the mind for brief intervals of history.3
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Ironically, Gardner's view of the early twentieth century as a sort of golden age of liberal humanism is itself a form of historicism that dares not speak its name. What is more, it overlooks certain key facts about the period in question. Considering only the time-frame from 1900 through 1901, history records the following:
Global conditions would only disintegrate further in the next decade, leading to previously unprecedented levels of divisiveness and disarray. Before mid century there would be two major world wars and a revolution in Russia that would have catastrophic consequences for generations thereafter. The modern period, for all its perfervid creativity, was torn by a violence of such unexampled magnitude that few before 1900 could have anticipated the advent of such massive psychological dislocation and physical turmoil.
As for the twentieth-century artists themselves, Gardner candidly concludes that the "carnage around a great creator is not a pretty sight, and this destructiveness occurs whether the individual is engaged in a solitary pursuit or ostensibly working for the betterment of mankind."4
Early in his book, Gardner links creativity to divergent thinking: "the ability to come up with many associations, at least some of which are idiosyncratic and possibly unique."5 If this is the case, it stands to reason that the more good ideas one has on hand, the greater the possible number of creative associations one might be able to make. Therefore, the artist who circumscribes the range of his/her ideas to the here and now, operating within the ideological and aesthetic parameters defined by contemporary practice, is at a decided disadvantage vis-à-vis the artist whose mind is receptive to ideas emanating from everywhere and everywhen. This is precisely the psychically expansive advantage conferred by eclecticism and historicism. At its most extreme, modernism, by contrast, would implode on itself rather than risk being tainted by anything extraneous—that is to say, antecedent to—itself.
All of the artists Gardner chose to study in Creating Minds—including Stravinsky—were veritable icons of modernism. Yet all were historicists and eclectics who without exception looked "backward" for inspiration. In this light, it seems that the paradox Gardner 's research succeeds in bringing to the fore is more spectral than real, resulting from the misguided zeal with which critics, scholars, and artists themselves have erroneously categorized, polemicized, and politicized the various products of human creativity. Modernism could not have expunged the past without annihilating the very background that rendered it visible and upon which its identity was thus fundamentally dependent.
If one approaches the question of creativity with the modernist bias that conspicuous innovation and the "strangeness" it confers are the absolute bona fides of genius, then a James Joyce will invariably prevail in critics' lists over a stodgy old Sir Walter Scott, a Jackson Pollock will handily paint the likes of a Jacques-Louis David into the shade, a Daniel Libeskind will tower high above the tallest spire ever imagined by an A. W. N. Pugin, and a John Cage will be to a Johannes Brahms as a silver-tongued Bodhisattva to a trolling troglodyte. The "creativity" criteria to which one adheres inevitably give rise to judgments that fulfill conditioned expectations.
Unfortunately, Gardner falls into this very trap when he compares Berlioz and Saint-Saëns:
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"Of the once prodigious Camille Saint-Saëns, Berlioz quipped, 'He knows everything but lacks inexperience.' Making original creative contributions to a domain emerges as an enterprise quite different from mastering the domain as it has been practiced in the recent past."6
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The implication here, of course, is that a hidebound Saint-Saëns is hoist on his own precocious petard, martyred from childhood by his all-too-facile mastery of and adherence to musical tradition. Having delivered his own verdict against Saint-Saëns, Gardner performs something of a volte-face and admonishes his readers about the dangers of judging the living: "Indeed, knowledge that one will be judged on some criterion of 'creativeness' or 'originality' tends to narrow the scope of what one can produce (leading to products that are then judged as relatively conventional); in contrast, the absence of an evaluation seems to liberate creativity."7
If this is true, one must question the very purpose and value of creativity research if it is to serve no other end but the establishment of some scale whereby to weigh the relative merits of the dead. But of course living artists, well aware of the inevitability of their own demise, will not want their work to be posthumously condemned because it proves to be excessively heavy in tradition and objectionably light in innovation on such a creativity scale. They, too, will feel the pressure to conform if they suspect their creativity quotients will ultimately be ascertained by an equation in which originality is always inversely proportional to the presence of the past. If this is to be the outcome, would it not be far better to leave creativity untrammeled by tendentious research?
In addition to Gardner's modernist leanings, his case studies also reflect a degree of cultural bias. Of his six subjects—Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi—four are American and/or European and only one is of Asian origin. Are non-Western nations less likely to consider "innovation" the most important factor in the determination of creativity? Was it not Gandhi who spun his own cloth, obtained his salt directly from the sea, and foreswore the creature comforts afforded by a modern society whose overlords shamelessly exploited the innovative technology at their disposal to subjugate the impoverished masses of India?
Without succumbing to the irrational extremes of certain postcolonial rhetoricians, it seems fair to ask, "How would 'creativity' be defined by an Australian aboriginal whose deepest perceptions are shaped by the 'Dream-Time'? What does 'creativity' mean to sub-Saharan Africans or indigenous inhabitants of the Amazonian rain forest who eke out a living in much the same way that their ancestors did thousands of years ago? What does 'creativity' signify to an Iraqi scholar desperately trying to restore the lost cultural patrimony of her war-torn nation? What is 'creativity' to a Native American trying to revive and perpetuate the vanishing artistic and cultural traditions of his tribe? What, indeed, constitutes 'creativity' for a well-educated North American of European extraction who, disillusioned with the intellectual dishonesty and self-serving political agenda of the modernist arts establishment, dares to entertain the idea that greatness in art is not primarily about innovation but rests firmly on the bedrock of tradition?"
If, as Gardner claims, creativity is "inherently a communal or cultural judgment," he must explain why the communal culture on which he largely bases his judgments is that of an elite but miniscule minority of the modern industrialized world of North America and Western Europe, whose combined populations represent only about twenty percent of human opinion. In future, one would hope that Gardner, whose illuminating investigation of multiple intelligences has contributed significantly to educational psychology and related disciplines, would adopt a more global perspective towards his subject, and would be more receptive to the possibility of examining the anatomy and phenomenology of creativity from a vantage point outside the framework of modernist ideology.
