Criticizing Creation

In a number of earlier posts (It’s Time to Start Writing; Another Short Revision; First This, Then That), we have looked at the essential difference between the frame of mind we assume in undertaking an initial draft and the very different mind we put on to revise that first attempt.

The British novelist E. M. Forster, in a 1951 collection of essays entitled Two Cheers for Democracy, likewise says that “there is a basic difference between the critical and creative states of mind.” In the creative state, an artist, he says, “lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art.” In the critical state, however, which is complementary to, not competitive with, the creative state, the artist

employs some of the highest and subtlest faculties of man. But it is grotesquely remote from the state responsible for the works it affects to expound. It does not let down buckets into the subconscious…. While not excluding imagination and sympathy, it keeps them and all the faculties under control, and only employs them when they promise to be helpful.

“Grotesquely” here means extremely, not disparate. The creative and critical frames of mind are not different in kind, but they are yet poles apart. The critical habit of mind controls the effusive rise of creation. Control means attending to the principles and rules of an art, and in the art of language those are the syntactical principles and grammatical designs within which we shape our language to communicate thoughts and emotions to others. “Think before you speak is criticism’s motto; speak before you think creation’s,” says Forster.

And this same distinction between the creative and critical habits in art applies more largely to the work of education as well. In a venerable and articulate study entitled Liberal Education, the American poet and author Mark Van Doren says, in effect, that our creativity in defining the curriculum has not been tempered enough by a critical examination of aims and purpose. We are trying to do too much:

It becomes truly important when its limits are seen. What cannot be done will not be attempted at the cost of discrediting the whole enterprise; but what can be done—and the doing of this makes all the difference—will be done as artists do things, with skill and thorough care, and with a reverence not hostile to high spirits.

And he concludes: “If a right relation is maintained between detail and principle, the detail will not be forgotten.” Van Doren’s right relation is Forster’s critical and creative states of mind. Being attentive to this distinction will help us press on past the yawning stretches of a blank screen or piece of paper when we just can’t seem to advance our thoughts. Examine with a critical glance what our creative moment has poured onto the paper. Analyze its structure, ask it questions, better it, add to it, subtract from it—but above all don’t quit. The ancient mythographers knew that standing still with a defeated sigh was the only trap the hero had in truth to walk around.

***