Creation, Imitation, and Translation

Abstract

PEOPLE NORMALLY CARRY AROUND an assumption about what sort of process writing is. Most of us would call it a process of creation-the process. There are two types of that men have thought about: from nothing, conceived of by Jews and Christians as proper to God; and from something, which is probably nearer to the thing we expect from the writer. It is important to make this distinction because it helps avoid the confusion which sees the writer's method as peculiarly godlike, or, alternatively, as more godlike than any other of men's actions. It would confuse even less if we dropped the word creation and saw the artistic process as simply a reordering and recombining of the elements of experience. But two things are missing in this account. First, the probability that the whole in a work of art is greater than the sum of its parts. What contributes this wholeness? Secondly, the reordering and recombining of experience takes place in terms of a totally different code-in the case of writing, experience is coded through language. That is to say the word cat is not the thing cat. Is this the element-the fact of language, of paint, of the medium? But the word scarcely satisfies used in either of these ways. The wholeness of a work of art will probably indicate the way in which the various parts contributing to that work are brought into relationship, and it would seem to be impossible to talk of relationship as a function separately from the things related. A phrase like creative element cannot, then, be used independent of the parts of the work since these and the way in which they are disposed are precisely part of that act of creation. In the second case, if the medium itself is seen as the element, we cannot easily deal with those properties of art which are representational, the mirroring of society, realistic dialogue, flesh colors in a portrait, imitative sounds in music. The mirror up to nature would clearly be beside the point where, as Yeats says, words alone are certain good. But the mirror up to nature clearly is relevant-at the very least -and we have to ask Yeats, what good? The word as describing the artistic process is uncomfortable in that it tempts us to undervalue the derivative elements in art. I mean derivative both from other works of art-a tradition-and also from the natural world and society -representational. It suggests aims of originality or of bringing into being inde-