H UBERT Z APF Metaphors of Literary Creativity I Introductory Remarks: Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory The assumption that metaphors and metaphorical language are not just borderline cases of normal speech and rhetorical embellishments of rational argument but form a constitutive element of human discourse and knowledge is not entirely new in cultural and philosophical history. Outside the grand narrative of Enlightenment rationalism, there had been a long, alternative philosophical tradition from Vico, Herder, and the Romantics to Nietzsche and Vaihinger, for whom the fundament of language was not literal but imaginative and metaphorical. Nietzsche postulated a Fundamentaltrieb, a fundamental anthropological drive of human beings towards metaphor-making, which corresponded to his conception of language and thought as world-producing, life-enhancing forms of cultural productivity rather than as representations of pre-existing realities. 1 In the 20 th century, the philosopher Hans Blumenberg was one prominent voice who, building on ideas of Ernst Cassirer and others, pointed out the necessary role of what he called “background metaphors” (such as Light, Book, or Shipwreck) for knowledge which went beyond the reductivism of abstract concepts, and which took account of the hermeneutical embeddedness of human thought in the complexities of the lifeworld. Yet it was only in the latter part of the 20 th century that this fundamental role of the metaphorical mode has been gaining increasing acceptance in the humanities. One direction of current transdisciplinary scholarship in which the significance of metaphors has been emphasised is cultural ecology, according to which metaphoric rather than logocentric speech is seen to correspond to the interrelational, dynamical, and metamorphotic world-view and epistemology of ecology. According to Gregory Bateson, the pioneer of cultural ecology, there is an affinity between the metaphorical, “poetic” mode of 1 Nietzsche says about this drive of metaphor-building: “[Es ist ein] Fundamentaltrieb des Menschen, den man keinen Augenblick wegrechnen kann, weil man damit den Menschen selbst wegrechnen würde.“ Friedrich Nietzsche, Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn, Vol. III/ 2. Nachgelassene Schriften 1870-1873, eds. Giorgio Golli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967) 381. H UBERT Z APF 264 language and ecological thinking because both are relational and assume analogies between heterogeneous spheres, particularly between the spheres of culture and of nature. 2 Another direction of contemporary scholarship which has systematically addressed the world-making and mind-shaping power of metaphors and which has become increasingly visible in recent years, is cognitive linguistics and the cognitive sciences. Combining linguistic, anthropological, evolutionary, and neurological research, cognitive science newly assesses the role and function of metaphors in language and culture on the interface between different disciplines. In the works of cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff, Mark Turner, Merlin Donald, Peer Aage Brandt and others, metaphors are not only a hallmark of literary writings, but a formative and indispensible aspect of all human language, thought, and, indeed, of life. Metaphors We Live By, the title of Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s seminal book on the subject, has become a catchword phrase that indicates the extent to which the epistemological power of metaphors has found the attention of cognitive linguists, who simultaneously integrated findings from areas such as brain research, evolutionary biology, psychology, and cultural history. For a considerable time, however, cognitive scientists tended to focus primarily on the role of metaphors in everyday language and thought, and to take metaphors in literary texts merely as instances of the universal range of collectively shared cultural metaphors, demonstrating how these general “conceptual metaphors” 3 — such as LIFE IS A JOURNEY, DEATH IS A FI- NAL DESTINATION, TIME IS A RIVER, ANGER IS HEAT — also provide the imaginative material of literary texts. It has only been more recently that attention has been directed, at least to some extent, to the specific ways in which art and literature deal with these metaphors, in which they extend, intensify, differentiate, defamiliarize, recombine, and recontextualize those conventional metaphors in innovative ways, thereby creating new metaphorical and imaginative spaces which can be productively reintegrated into the larger process of cultural evolution. This interest in the creative potential of art and literature has been documented in an essay collection edited by Turner, The Artful Mind, 4 in which art and literature are no longer viewed as a separate, more or less marginal supplement to everyday language and thought but as an exemplary site of exploration and collectively relevant testing-ground for the ways we think, in which the mind works, and in which human creativity functions. 2 Gregory Bateson, A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Harper Collins, 1991) 237-42. 3 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980). 4 Mark Turner, ed., The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006). Metaphors of Literary Creativity 265 In my paper, I would like to take up these cues and focus on the question of how the phenomenon of literary creativity can be newly illuminated by relating such findings of cognitive linguistics and contemporary creativity research to literary studies. More specifically, I would like to ask to what extent the generative power of metaphors that is described in different but comparable ways by cognitive science and by cultural ecology, is paradigmatically expressed and explored in the metaphors of creativity that have shaped and continue to shape literary history and theory. I am therefore not merely “applying” concepts of cognitive linguistics or cultural ecology to literary studies but rather ask how the particular form of cultural knowledge provided by literature and literary studies can contribute in significant ways to elucidate the crucial issues of metaphors and cultural creativity that are addressed within those transdisciplinary directions of research. My argument can be summarized in the following points: 1. Creativity is an important concept in contemporary science which is discussed and explored in different disciplines but which has been rather neglected in literary studies, even though art and literature are especially instructive examples of cultural creativity. 2. Literary texts are meta-cognitive, they are self-reflexive models of human cognition and creativity. Since metaphors are a constitutive mode and medium of literary production, metaphors of creativity in literary texts are a central site of the articulation and reflection of creative processes in literature and culture. 3. The two poles of traditional metaphors of literary creativity are “inspiration” and “composition.” They have shaped different periods of literary and cultural history, but more often than not, they can be seen to interact in complex and productive ways in actual texts. 4. The structure of creativity as it emerges from these metaphors is paradoxical. It includes rational and pre-rational, conscious and unconscious, selfreferential and relational factors which cannot be brought into one closed or coherent system. 5. This corresponds to findings of contemporary creativity research, which describes the structure of creativity as a combination of incompatibles, a paradoxical integration of the non-integrated, as an “excess structure” (Brandt) in which the logical order of thoughts is suspended and the otherwise inaccessible can be symbolically represented. 6. Metaphors are a central form of this creativity because they involve the mapping and blending of heterogeneous domains onto each other. Acts of multiple conceptual blending in art generate “emergent structures” (Turner) of high semantic density and complexity in texts, which are at the same time highly indeterminate and open to interpretation, and therefore depend on the creative response of the reader to actualize their possible meanings. H UBERT Z APF 266 7. These processes and metaphors of literary creativity can be usefully described from the perspective of cultural ecology. As can be seen from numerous examples, nature and the body are particularly frequent source domains of metaphors of creativity in texts. This indicates that the culture-nature relationship as the fundamental matrix of cultural ecology is an especially productive source and generative principle of metaphors of literary creativity. 8. Metaphors of literary creativity in this view are interpendent with more general cultural functions of literary texts such as critically balancing cultural deficits, breaking up collective traumas, activating marginalized or excluded dimensions of the civilizing system, developing alternatives to established cultural practices, and thereby renewing the vitality and creativity of the larger culture. Literary creativity as symbolic representation of the nonrepresented has thus not only ecological but ethical implications for a more open, inclusive, and pluralistic concept of life and human culture. II Cultural Ecology, Cognitive Science, and Literary Creativity Cognitive science and cultural ecology have in common that their work is positioned in an intermediate realm between the natural and the cultural sciences. While cognitive science combines linguistics with anthropology and neurology, cultural ecology transfers the study of natural ecosystems to cultural ecosystems. Both approaches, however, if they are to be convincingly related to phenomena of culture and literature, must be aware of functional and epistemological differences between the areas of knowledge they are trying to integrate. Science and literature, evolutionary biology and cultural studies represent distinct cultures of knowledge that have evolved in their own ways in modern history, and that can only fruitfully be brought together in a non-reductive transdisciplinary dialogue which avoids simply subsuming the one under the other’s premises. In cultural ecology, this difference between disciplines and cultures of knowledge has been acknowledged even while the attempt to create a new “unity of knowledge” 5 across the specialised subdisciplines of contemporary science seems a fascinating and indispensable project since reality in an ecological view is not characterized by isolated phenomena but by complex interrelations and interactions between them. If interdependence and diversity are complementary principles of an ecological epistemology, the dialogue between different disciplines and cultures of knowledge must observe these principles as well. Cultural ecology has branched out from biological ecology into a multidisciplinary project in a process in which former deter- 5 Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1999). Metaphors of Literary Creativity 267 ministic assumptions about the culture-nature relationship have been superseded by more complex views of interdependence-yet-difference. 6 On the one hand, cultural ecology considers the sphere of human culture not as separate from but as interdependent with and transfused by ecological processes and natural energy cycles. On the other hand, it recognizes the relative independence and self-reflexive dynamics of cultural processes. Even as the dependency of culture on nature, and the ineradicable presence of nature in culture, gain ever more interdisciplinary attention, the difference between cultural evolution and natural evolution is acknowledged by cultural ecologists. Rather than genetic laws, information and communication have become major driving forces of cultural evolution. 7 While causal deterministic laws are therefore not applicable in the sphere of culture, there are nevertheless productive analogies which can be drawn between ecological and cultural processes. Gregory Bateson’s project of an Ecology of Mind (1973) is based on general principles of complex dynamical life processes, for example the concept of feedback loops, which he saw as operating both between the mind and the world and within the mind itself. What is foregrounded in this view is the processual, interactional, and selfreflexive qualities of mental, psychological, and communicational phenomena. Bateson’s methodological move opened up an innovative new area of research in which cultural processes could be investigated in their structural coevolution with natural processes, while at the same time their irreducible complexity, flexibility, and creativity were brought out in even greater force. In the recent versions of cognitive science I am referring to in my article, too, this awareness of a double epistemological perspective, of the recognition of both the interrelatedness and the difference between nature and culture, brain and mind, natural and cultural evolution seems to be present as a necessary working hypothesis for transdisciplinary work across the boundaries between the natural and cultural sciences. In the work of Turner and others, the complex operations and the creative potential of the “artful” human mind in its activities of cognitive integration and conceptual blending emerge as a culture-specific feature of the human species, which distinguishes it from other species. 8 This view recognises both the interdependence and the semi-independent dynamics of cultural versus natural evolution, mind versus brain, and creative adaptability versus genetic determination. Creativity, as a faculty of the human mind and a force of cultural evolution, is a crucial aspect of this evolutionary dynamics. Creativity, however, is by 6 Disciplines on both sides of the divide thereby turn into “shifting hybrid domains” (Wilson 10) in which traditional disciplinary boundaries are blurred. 7 See Peter Finke, Die Ökologie des Wissens: Exkursionen in eine gefährdete Landschaft (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2005). 8 Turner, The Artful Mind. H UBERT Z APF 268 definition a non-deterministic concept. It designates a phenomenon which simultaneously triggers and resists the attempts of its scientific explanation. It thus epitomizes, in the attempts to illuminate and “domesticate” this phenomenon within different frames of reference, the double epistemological status between conceptual appropriation and resistance to conceptualization, between causal-empirical explanation and transcausal agency and intentionality which is characteristic of the study of phenomena and processes of human culture. III The Concept of Creativity in Science and Literary Studies It is remarkable to see that while the question of creativity has become an important topic and focus of attention in many different disciplines, it has almost disappeared from the agenda of recent literary scholarship. In 2005, for example, the German Congress of Philosophy in Berlin, an international conference featuring twenty-eight sections with over a hundred papers, was devoted to the topic of “Creativity,” including interdisciplinary contributions not only from philosophy but from law, economics, religion, ethics, psychology, genetic research, neuroscience, linguistics, and art history but no contribution from literary studies. This conspicuous abstinence and scepticism is in part understandable as a reaction to the romantic idealization of the creative genius as a God-like creator of immortal works, a myth which remained influential into the 20 th century, but appeared no longer acceptable in modern and postmodern times, in which instead the dependence of all art on previous art, of texts on intertexts, of individual works on cultural conditions, has become the prevalent view of literary production. On the other hand, the concept of creativity in science and technology has its own ambivalences. Its emergence as a widely used and discussed concept was initially connected to a political context, the competition of the superpowers in the Cold War, in which the United States after the Sputnik shock of 1957 tried to mobilize the creative minds of scientists to serve the cause of democracy by producing new ideas, inventions, and military technologies. In the field of economics, too, creativity became an influential concept which, building on ideas such as Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” taught managers and business leaders that to be truly innovational, they also had to be destructive and have the courage to radically demolish and rearrange previous forms of production and economic structures. While creativity thus became an instrument of strategic planning during the Cold War and an ideological tool in the global expansion of a laissez-faire capitalism, it simultaneously became a favourite subject in psychology and in the wider culture as well, particularly in the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, where it was a key concept in the democratic self- Metaphors of Literary Creativity 269 empowerment and liberation of individuals and communities from the constraints of a conformist, one-dimensional society. If creativity was, on the one hand, instrumentalized for political, economic, and military purposes as part of a discourse of innovation based on an unlimited belief in scientifictechnological progress, it became, on the other hand, a metaphor of personal and communal emancipation from those same forces of technology and social conformism, which found expression in alternative lifestyles, in popular culture, in guides to creative self-fulfilment, in antiauthoritarian education or in experimental forms of postmodern art such as, for example, Joseph Beuys’ assumption of the universal creativity of humans and his famous proclamation that every human being is potentially an artist. 9 Creativity is thus a highly ambivalent but powerful concept in contemporary culture and science. The lack of attention in literary studies to the phenomenon of creativity is all the more astonishing because there is a long tradition in literature and literary theory which, implicitly and explicitly, has dealt with this phenomenon in particularly instructive and complex ways that appear specifically relevant today. As Merlin Donald among others observes, literary texts are meta-cognitive, they are self-reflexive models of human cognition and creativity. 10 Since metaphors are a constitutive mode and medium of literary production, it appears that metaphors of creativity in literary texts are a central site of the articulation and reflection of creative processes in literature and culture. IV Metaphors of Creativity in Literary History and Theory Metaphors of literary creativity have been traditionally positioned between the two poles of inspiration and composition, one referring to the sources of the inner mental, emotional, and psychological energy of the artist for creating artworks, the other to the craft, rules, techniques, and formal requirements of the successful execution of the artwork. One pole goes back, basically, to Plato, for whom poetry was a pararational, philosophically questionable form of magical inspiration, the other to Aristotle, for whom poiesis was a rational form of making and composing symbolic action in language as a carefully structured whole based on the mimesis of culturally representative experience. Both positions have been present in different forms and mixtures in literary history. Associated with the pole of inspiration, typical metaphors are the invocation of muses, of divine or demonic spirits, visions, dreams, hallucinations, flashes of insight, epiphanies, journeys into underworlds or 9 Surprisingly enough, this view seems to tie up with recent findings of cognitive science in which the human mind, too, is “artful” by its nature and its cultural evolution. (See Turner, The Artful Mind) 10 Merlin Donald, “Art and Cognitive Evolution,” ed. Turner, The Artful Mind 5. H UBERT Z APF 270 surreal trance states — in other words, imaginative scenarios in which the poetic self experiences borderline states of ecstasy, of being “outside of itself,” which bring it into contact with a transhuman sphere and agency that lends him a rare power of speech and insight into the deeper meanings of the human world. Literary creativity is staged here as an encounter between the poetic self and an Other whose symbolic presence is regarded as a necessary but never fully available source of imaginative energy and inspiration. Eros and love, of course, have been preferred topoi of this inspirational force throughout literary history, which is not only true of classical examples like minnesongs or renaissance and romantic love poetry but persists in modern literature as well, as, for example, in Emily Dickinson’s poem: Love — is anterior to Life — Posterior — to Death — Initial to Creation, and The Exponent of Earth. 11 It also occurs in contemporary novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love, or Siri Hustvedt’s What I Loved, in all of which an intensely beloved Other becomes the inspirational power for the narrative process. Another predominant manifestation of this inspirational power has been the fascination with great poets and texts, some notable examples being Chapman’s translation of Homer to Keats, the visionary encounter with William Blake for the poetological awakening of Allen Ginsberg, the magic of a Schubert song for Samuel Beckett’s short film Nacht und Träume, or the magnetic pull of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) for Marc Estrin’s novel Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa. On the other hand, the pole of ‘creativity as composition’ is associated with metaphors such as ‘art as work,’ ‘as technique,’ ‘as mastery of forms and materials.’ It refers to the ‘making’ and formal and material production of an artefact which is designed to achieve maximum cultural representativeness and effect. To achieve this purpose, the knowledge and observance of the rules of the trade, of the use of language, the genres, the structural principles of successful writing have primary significance. This Aristotelian view of art as carefully structured, culturally representative mimesis engineered towards certain effects and audience response was, of course, the long-dominant view of the classical tradition from Horace to the Renaissance and into the 18 th century. In the 19 th century, Edgar Allan Poe’s essay on “The Philosophy of Composition” is a programmatic statement of the concept of artistic creativity as a rational, carefully planned and executed activity, explaining how an apparently mystical, dark romantic poem like “The Raven” was in fact com- 11 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Boston: Little Brown, 1924) 1037. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 271 posed in such a way that every detail of its form is deduced with inevitable logic from its intended effect and overall thematic design. Realism, naturalism, and modernism tended to objectify the process of literary production even further. In T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” for example, poetic production is radically depersonalized and is likened to a chemical experiment in which heterogeneous elements from lived experience are brought to mutual reactions in the act of their imaginative synthesis. 12 And in terms of literary innovation, according to Eliot, new works of art can only claim validity if they are aware of the history of their precursors, if the poet has the whole tradition of literature “in his bones.” 13 In postmodern times, this view of the individual text as a site of endless intertextual recycling has been radicalized. Constructivist metaphors and theories of creativity have gained prominence, and concepts from systems theory like emergence, autopoiesis, or self-organization have tended to replace the idea of individual creativity, emphasizing a quasi-objective, demystifying, and often subject-less view of literary creation, which has also influenced contemporary conceptions of art. An extreme form of this practice, of course, are computer-produced texts where individual authorship is wholly replaced by the automatic writing and composing of word sequences or indeed of music and visual art by self-generating computer programs. Yet as has been indicated, the metaphor of spontaneous, inspirational creativity has not wholly disappeared from art and literature. Instead, it has reappeared in ever new combinations with the compositional, intertextual, and intermedial pole especially in postcolonial and multicultural literatures. Indeed it seems that the traditional opposition between inspiration and composition has been translated in post-romantic literature into two kinds of interrelated metaphorical fields and imaginative spaces — into metaphors of creative energy and into metaphors of connecting patterns. The first of them is a chaotic, explosive, disruptive, and radically defamiliarizing textual force, the other a connective, integrational, pattern-building, webmaking, and intertextual force. Rather than an exclusionary opposition, an often conflictive yet also complementary interaction between the two poles is characteristic of how creative processes work and are staged in literary texts. V Contemporary Creativity Research and Literature The paradoxical structure of creativity as it emerges here seems to be confirmed by modern creativity research. 12 T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” ed. Hazard Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971) 785. 13 Eliot 784. H UBERT Z APF 272 According to the recent consensus of research, the structure of creativity lies in the integration of alterities and dualities, the bipolarity of product features, the oscillation of processual factors and the paradoxical nature of the components. 14 Hallmarks of the creative mind are originality, spontaneity, and “divergent thinking,” which especially includes the ability to combine opposites and to bring together contradictory mental domains — rationality and emotion, planning and spontaneity, distance and empathy, a sense of order and a tolerance of chaos. 15 The creative process is usually differentiated into the four stages of preparation, incubation, illumination, and elaboration 16 — whereby the first and fourth stage is clearly related to the metaphor of creativity as work and composition, the second and third to the metaphor of creativity as inspiration and “unconscious intuition.” 17 This double dynamics appears to transform itself into the creative product: Arthur Koestler calls this phenomenon “bi-sociation,” which he describes as a “clash of two incompatible codes” and which “always operates on more than one plane” simultaneously. 18 The evolutionary biologist Manfred Eigen refers in this context to the two hemispheres of the brain, with which different dispositions and faculties of the human mind are associated — conscious, verbal, intellectual, analytical, logical-constructive versus unconscious, musical, visual, holistic, and metaphoric faculties. 19 While in everyday thought and cultural practice, these spheres are usually kept apart, the act of creativity, according to Eigen, is characterized by a complex interplay of the two habitually separated hemispheres of the brain. Even if this distinction seems meanwhile less rigid in current neuroscience, it still provides a useful hypothesis that helps to illuminate the lateral, transversal dynamics of creativity. 20 14 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, ed., Kreativität — ein verbrauchter Begriff? (München: Fink, 1988) 11 (my translation). 15 Norbert Groeben, “Literary Creativity,” The Psychology and Sociology of Literature: Utrechtse Publikaties voor Algemene Literatuurwetenschap 35, eds. Dick Schram and Gerard Steen (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001) 17-34. 16 Henri Poincaré, “Mathematical Creation,” trans. George Bruce Halsted, The Fountain of Science (1908; Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1915). 17 Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964). 18 Koestler 35. 19 See Manfred Eigen, “Mozart — oder unser Unvermögen, das Genie zu begreifen,” Kreativiät, ed. Rainer M. Holm-Hadulla (Berlin: Springer, 2000) 27-46. 20 The activities of the two hemispheres cannot be sharply separated but are linked by the corpus callosum. Nevertheless, the production of metaphors and emotionally charged images seems to be primarily located in the right hemisphere and the production of linear, nonmetaphoric verbal concepts in the left hemisphere. What this means is that metaphors go beyond a specifically verbal thinking and are based on preverbal recognition of similarities. Metaphorical thinking, in its preverbal dimension as basic perception of similarities and its verbal dimension as a rhetorical device of language, thus seems to be one form of mental activity which extends across the two hemispheres of Metaphors of Literary Creativity 273 In this light, literary creativity appears as a cultural form which partakes of and combines elements from both sides of this polarity. It is a form of cultural textuality whose “generative signature” 21 consists in symbolically bringing together what is habitually or culturally separated, opening up closed systems of thought towards complex dynamical interactions of rational and pre-rational, abstract and concrete, analytic and holistic modes of language and experience. If the human brain strives “for the integration of perceptual and conceptual material over time,” 22 and towards the construction of unity in the diversity of information that the brain has to process, then the literary imagination seems to be a form of cultural creativity which specifically corresponds to and draws on this inherent human disposition. Metaphors in literary texts are an exemplary form of this activity because they perform the mapping and blending of heterogeneous domains onto each other in ways which generate both diversity and unity, the semantic pluralisation, and the imaginative “compression” 23 of their material. This imaginative compression of divergent domains of knowledge, according to Turner, is rooted in basic everyday operations of the human mind, but gains its characteristic and most productive cultural expression in art. “Double-scope blending”, that is the blending of divergent mental spaces into a new, “emergent structure,” “is the crucial incremental cognitive capacity that makes it possible for human beings to create and share art.” 24 The acts of multiple conceptual blending which achieve the imaginative compression of divergent domains of knowledge generate emergent structures of high semantic density and complexity in texts, which are at the same time highly indeterminate and open to interpretation, and therefore depend on the creative response of the reader to actualize their possible meanings. In art and especially in modern art, this compression and complex integration is not an easy and harmonious process but involves tension and conflict, because it specifically aims at the inclusion of the non-integrated, the incompatible, the excluded and forbidden into language and cultural discourses. A particularly interesting mode of such cognitive integration is the the brain: Katrin Kohl, Poetologische Metaphern: Formen und Funktionen in der deutschen Literatur (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007) 153. 21 Wolfgang Iser adopts this term from William Wimsatt’s concept of “generative entrenchment,” which Wimsatt relates to evolutionary history but which Iser transfers to the aesthetic conceptions that have evolved in cultural history and that have shaped the conditions of literary emergence and productivity. See Wolfgang Iser, “Von der Gegenwärtigkeit des Ästhetischen,” Theorien der Literatur: Grundlagen und Perspektiven, eds. Hans Vilmar Geppert and Hubert Zapf, (Tübingen: Francke, 2003) 9-28. 22 Donald 4. 23 Turner, The Artful Mind. 24 Turner, The Artful Mind 94. H UBERT Z APF 274 mode of “forbidden fruit-integration,” 25 that is the juxtaposing and blending of mainstream cultural concepts with cultural taboos, of official discourses with repressed zones of the collective consensus, of established norms with the culturally excluded or stigmatized. The forbidden fruit metaphor takes the story of the Fall of Man from Genesis as a prototypical scene of creative transgression, opening up a self-enclosed normative system towards a process of discovery and self-knowledge which is both painful and potentially regenerative. The act of cognitive integration of the excluded is thus highly conflictive and problematic yet also highly creative, generating new structural connections in otherwise unrelated material but also, as Per Aage Brandt formulates it, an “excess structure” in which the variously conceived “Other” of dominant cultural assumptions and truth-claims can be articulated, which remains unarticulated in non-literary modes of speech and discourse. 26 This excess structure can relate to a cultural other, an erotic or transhuman force, the rationally unavailable, a non-linear process, the nonhuman other of the pre-cultural world of nature, or the indeterminacy of the text itself, which in this view is not simply a resistance to structural order and control but a necessary source and element of the text’s creative process. VI Cultural Ecology and Literary Creativity I would like to suggest that one of the ways in which this dynamical interactional structure of literary creativity can be usefully illuminated is by looking at it from the perspective of cultural ecology. In Peter Finke’s project of an evolutionary cultural ecology, Bateson’s ecology of mind is fused with concepts from systems theory. The various sections and subsystems of society are described as “cultural ecosystems” with their own processes of production, reduction, and consumption of energy — involving physical as well as psychic energy. This also applies to the cultural ecosystems of art and of literature, which follow their own internal forces of selection and selfrenewal, but also have an important function within the cultural system as a whole. From the perspective of this kind of cultural ecology, the internal landscapes produced by modern culture and consciousness are equally important for human beings as their external environments. Human beings are, as it were, by their very nature not only instinctual but cultural beings. Literature and other forms of cultural imagination and cultural creativity are necessary to continually restore the richness, diversity, and complexity of those inner landscapes of the mind, the imagination, the emotions, and interpersonal communication which make up the cultural ecosystems of modern 25 Turner, The Artful Mind 111. 26 Peter Aage Brandt, “Form and Meaning in Art,” The Arful Mind, ed. Mark Turner 176. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 275 humans, but are threatened by impoverishment by an increasingly overeconomized, standardized, and depersonalized contemporary world. Viewed in this context, literature appears itself as the symbolic medium of a particularly powerful form of “cultural ecology” in the sense that it has staged and explored, in ever new scenarios, the complex feedback relationship of prevailing cultural systems with the needs and manifestations of human and non-human “nature,” and from this paradoxical act of creative regression has drawn its specific power of innovation and cultural selfrenewal. 27 Literature in this view acts like an ecological force within language and the larger system of cultural discourses, transforming logocentric structures into energetic processes, and opening up the logical space of linear conceptual thought into the “ecological space” 28 of non-linear complex feedback relationships. As a transformative ecological energy-field within language and cultural discourses, literature is, on the one hand, a cultural-critical medium which exposes and stages the imbalances, repressions, hidden conflicts, ossifications, and blind spots of a civilizational reality system, and, on the other hand, a regenerative medium which articulates the culturally excluded and repressed in ways in which it is symbolically reintegrated into the larger ecology of life and into a renewed vital interrelationship between culture and nature. Literature thus operates between the poles of deconstruction and regeneration, of cultural criticism and cultural self-renewal. 29 In this productive force-field between literature and culture, the self-reflexive staging and imaginative exploration of the relationship between culture and nature represents a specifically powerful focus and source of creative energy. VII The Culture-Nature Relationship as Source Domain of Creativity Metaphors in Literary Texts It is remarkable to see to what extent nature and the body have provided significant source domains for metaphors of creativity throughout literary history. Even though they have gone through multiple changes and historical transformations, the reference to these source domains connects archaic with 27 See Hubert Zapf, Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie: Zur kulturellen Funktion imaginativer Texte an Beispielen des amerikanischen Romans (Tübingen: Narr, 2002) and Hubert Zapf, “Literature and Ecology: Introductory Remarks on a New Paradigm of Literary Studies,” Anglia 124, 1 (2006): 1-10. 28 See Peter Finke, “Kulturökologie,“ Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie, ed. Ansgar Nünning (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1998) 294-96. 29 See Zapf, Literatur als kulturelle Ökologie and Hubert Zapf, “New Directions in American Literary Studies: Ecocriticism and the Function of Literature as Cultural Ecology,“ English Studies Today: Recent Developments and New Directions, eds. Ansgar Nünning and Jürgen Schlaeger (Trier: WVT, 2007) 139-64. H UBERT Z APF 276 most recent forms of literature. Their continuing presence indicates that the reconnection of cultural evolution with natural evolution, of technocentric with “biocentric” 30 forms of life and sources of energy, seems a fundamental ecological matrix of literary texts. One significant source domain are the four elements as fundamental forms of experiencing the biocentric environment of human cultures. 31 The element of fire is specifically relevant as an inspirational force that is both creative and destructive, a sign of radical discontinuity yet also of new beginnings, of liberation and rebirth. It is connected to heat, light, intensity, and to productive yet also self-consuming creative energy. Personified in archaic mythological figures such as Phoenix the mythical firebird who dies in the fire and is reborn from the ashes, or Prometheus the bringer of fire and creator of humans, it has a memorable manifestation in the Pentecost event of the Bible, where the Holy Spirit appears in tongue-shaped flames above the heads of the assembled disciples, empowering them to inspired speech and transcultural communication beyond the boundaries of their own language. When such traditional mythological symbols are employed as metaphors of creativity in literary texts, of course, they have to be used creatively themselves. Otherwise they would remain clichés and be ill-suited to perform the process of literary and cultural self-renewal which they are intended to engender. Thus in the evolution of literature, they have been constantly extended, transformed, defamiliarized, ironized, recontextualized, and turned into self-referential signifiers of creative energy as in Nietzsche’s famous poem from Ecce Homo: Ja, ich weiß, woher ich stamme: Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme glühe und verzehr ich mich. Licht wird alles, was ich fasse, Kohle alles, was ich lasse — Flamme bin ich sicherlich. 32 Emily Dickinson in her paradoxical, radically revisionist way speaks of the “black light” inspiring her poetic imagination, and the modernist poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, too, describes the intensity of her creative self in the image of a candle consuming itself in the fire: “My candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night, / But oh, my foes, and ah, my friends, / It gives a lovely light.” 33 In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter, the letter A as the central textual signifier is associated with the inspirational heat of fire (when 30 See Wilson. 31 See Gernot Böhme, Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1989). 32 Nietzsche Vs 62. 33 Edna St. Vincent Millay, “First Pig,” A Few Figs from Thistles: Poems and Sonnets (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1922) 9. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 277 the narrator finds the original letter, a faded piece of cloth, among the forgotten archives of the Custom House and instinctively puts it on his breast, he feels a “burning heat” as of “red-hot iron,” and lets it fall to the floor in a moment which marks the return of his long-paralyzed imagination and enables him to write his novel). 34 A contemporary example would be Louise Erdrich’s Tales of Burning Love, where fire not only supplies the central metaphor for the mutual emotional and erotic obsessions of the four protagonists but for the metamorphotic powers of the postmodern Trickster narrator, who supposedly has died and been cremated but later unexpectedly reappears, alive and well, rising like Phoenix from his ashes. The volcano is a related metaphor. It points to a strong tension between surface and depth, to powerful underground energies which are striving for explosive release — as in Dickinson’s highly paradoxical poem “A Still, Volcano Life,” in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, or Susan Sontag’s Volcano Lover, all of these examples where the tension between explosive, formless chaotic energies and the normative strictures of social and linguistic conventions becomes the generative principle of the text. Air and wind, as the sound and energy of moving air, equally have been important signifiers of creativity, as in the myth of the Aeolian harp whose sounds are produced not by human hands but by the air itself, with Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest as a prime example representing the merging of wind, music, and the artistic imagination, or Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind” invoking the wind as “creator and destroyer” to renew the paralyzed creative imagination of the poetic self. Of course, the earth itself is presented as a source of literary creativity in the myth of the Magna Mater, in its cycles of fertility, of growth and decay, of death and rebirth, of day and night, of the seasons and the weather, of seascapes and landscapes, secluded valleys and sublime mountains — all of them becoming possible generative sites of the literary imagination throughout Western and non-Western literatures alike. A particularly frequent and significant source domain for metaphors of literary creativity is water. Springs and fountains as symbolic sites of origins and beginnings are frequent analogies of poetical creativity, as in gothic romantic form in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” whose mighty pleasure dome is built on a “savage place” from whose “chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, / As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, / A mighty fountain momently was forced; [...] / It flung up momently the sacred river.” 35 So are, less spectacularly, creeks or brooks as in Wilhelm Müller and Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, where the brook becomes an alter ego of 34 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008) 41, 196. 35 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ”Kubla Khan,” Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, eds. Meyer H. Abrams et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) 355. H UBERT Z APF 278 the human traveller inspiring a series of intensely emotional images, or in Robert Frost’s West-Running Brook, where the brook is addressed as a source of human and poetological origins — “It is from that in water we were from/ Long, long before we were from any creature [...] The tribute of the current to the source.” 36 Rivers, too, are frequent sites of literary inspiration as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where the flow of the text is modelled on the flowing stream of the Mississippi, or in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where the personified imaginative energy of the text, the ghost of the dead daughter, emerges from a river: “A fully dressed woman walked out of the water,” 37 a scene in which images from nature and culture are blended in a symbolic rising from the dead which initiates a polyphonic process of storytelling and remembering of a traumatizing past. Above all, the sea has been a major inspirational model for the poetic rendering of the contradictory forces of birth and death, beginnings and endings, Eros and Thanatos, culture and nature, a site of transformation and metamorphosis, of continuous change and endless return. The mythological birth of Venus from the sea foam has inspired numerous writers, among others Schiller, Rilke, Valéry, or Kate Chopin, whose Edna Pontellier in The Awakening is symbolically reborn on the beach in the ultimate scene of her awakening before her final return to the element of water: “She felt like a new-born creature opening her eyes in a familiar world she had never known.“ 38 The voice of the sea the protagonist hears even from a distance provides the rhythm for her continuous process of self-discovery and for the rhythm of the narration itself, which progresses in wave-like back and forthmovements that correspond to the undulating lines of the Undine-motif in fin de siècle-literature and that set the tone and theme of her many awakenings. In Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, the waves of the beach are analogues to the cycles of days and the overlapping life cycles of the fictional characters. In Gary Snyder’s poem “Wave,” the image of the wave supplies a structural archetype relating to the domains of nature, the human body, Eros, love, and, indeed, the physical concepts of wave and particle. In Jörg Schneider’s novel Das Wasserzeichen, water becomes a medium for the creative symbiosis of human and non-human life forms as personified in the amphibious protagonist. Plants and vegetation, too, are frequently used, especially flowers — from Wordsworth’s daffodils to the blue flower of his dreams in Novalis’ Heinrich 36 Robert Frost, “West-Running Brook,” Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 2, eds. Ronald Gottesmann et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979) 1131. 37 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; New York: Penguin/ Signet, 1991) 168. 38 Kate Chopin, The Awakening: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Nancy A. Walker (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1993) 136. Metaphors of Literary Creativity 279 von Ofterdingen, the rose throughout literary history in romantic love poetry to Joyce’s rose epiphany in chapter four of his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Rilke’s death poem on his epitaph about the rose as “reiner Widerspruch,” as pure contradiction, to William Carlos Williams’ ironic concession “The rose is obsolete BUT each petal extends,” up to Gertrude Stein’s autoreferential modernist version Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, but also the leaves of grass as a poetological principle of Walt Whitman’s poetry, and the soot-stained sunflower in Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Sunflower Sutra,” which in its external shabbiness but beautiful yellow inside represents an alter ego of the poetic speaker opening to him the creative potential of his hidden self in the midst of an industrial waste land. An equally prominent source domain of creativity metaphors is the animal world. Melville’s white whale in Moby Dick is an example of a sublime animal turning into a textual signifier which shapes the novel’s style and process and opens it up to an exploration of infinite interpretations and cultural meanings. In Emily Dickinson’s poem, “A Narrow Fellow in the Grass,” a snake becomes an image of the ambiguity of life and death inspiring her poetry, and in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat,” too, the snake is a central structural force of the text, which changes from a conventional symbol of evil to an African-American signifier of the female protagonist’s survival. Birds, of course, are frequent alter egos of poets and incarnations of the power of poetic speech and imagination, from Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” the spotted hawk in Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” to Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The White Heron,” and Robinson Jeffers’ “Vulture” to Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem.” In Native American literatures, the Trickster figure as a God-like figure of creation and destruction is often personified in animal shape as in Simon Ortiz’ “The Creation according to Coyote,” in which the biblical account of creation is overwritten by a Native American version where the Trickster’s creativity precisely results from the playful openness and unreliability of his speech, or in the mythopoetic figure of the spider-woman in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony as the imaginative source of the novel’s storytelling and symbolic healing ceremony: “Thought-Woman, the spider, / named things and / as she named them / they appeared.” 39 A particularly striking example for this imaginative blending and “compression” of the animal and the human world as the generative signature of a highly innovational text is the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar’s short story “Axolotl.” In the story, a human observer is fascinated by axolotls, a species of amphibians which remain in a larva state all their lives and have the ability to fully replace lost organs and even parts of the brain. They live in the aquarium of a zoo which the entranced first-person narrator visits daily and whose form of existence he imagines so intensely that at the end he finds himself turned into an axolotl in the aquarium watch- 39 Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) 1. H UBERT Z APF 280 ing through the glass the human observer watching him from the outside. The perspectives of subject and object, self and other, human und nonhuman life have been reversed, and it is the inescapable interdependenceyet-difference between the two that opens up the creative space of the story and of its reception by the reader. Apart from the manifold phenomena of the natural environment, bodily functions and forms of self-expression such as breathing, crying, laughing, dancing, or playing, and sensory perceptions such as seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, or tasting are metaphoric source domains for creative processes. Vision and epiphany, as sublime experience as in Romanticism or as momentary perception of everyday objects as in Modernism, and inspiration by sounds, noises, and the music of nature, both serve as such source domains. Gernot Böhme among others has shown to what extent bodily perceptions and sensations such as hot/ cold, soft/ hard, or solid/ fluid pervade language and thought as semiotic markers of an ongoing, life-sustaining ecological exchange relationship between the human organism and its environment, which constitutes the material of aesthetic productivity and sense-making. 40 VIII Conclusion I break off here. The examples I have mentioned, which could easily be multiplied, demonstrate that phenomena and processes of nature, of the human body, and of intense emotional states in their relation to processes of human culture, are used as particularly frequent metaphorical sources of literary creativity. Biocentric images from natural evolution are mapped onto and blended with images of a modern economic and technocentric culture. Thereby metaphors of physical energy are translated into metaphors of psychic and cultural energy, and this translation process is one important form that literary creativity seems to assume. The fundamental ecological relation between culture and nature thus emerges as a particularly powerful generative signature of texts. Its metaphorical transformations generate ever new emergent spaces in texts, in which conventional dichotomies of thought are dissolved and new ways of perceiving the vital interconnectedness between culture and nature are envisioned. This seems to correspond to fundamental features of creativity as described in cognitive theory, in which the integration of the non-integrated and culturally separated appears as a particularly important factor in creative acts (Brandt, Turner, etc.). 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