Creative Freedom in Nabby and the Pynch

[Terrance]

> I think one area of interesting comparison and contrast between
> the two authors might be this notion of creative freedom.



A creative writer, creative in the particular sense I am attempting to
convey, cannot help feeling that in his rejecting the world of the
matter-of-fact, in his taking sides with irrational, the illogical, the
inexplicable, and the fundamentally good, he is performing something
similar in the rudimentary way to what [two pages missing] under the
cloudy skies of gray Venus. 

[...]

Lunatics are lunatics just because they have thoroughly and recklessly
dismembered a familiar world but have not the power--or have lost the
power--to create a new one as harmonious as the old. The artist on the
other hand disconnects what he chooses and while doing so he is aware
that something in him is aware of the final result. When he examines his
completed masterpiece he perceives that whatever unconscious cerebration
had been involved in the creative plunge, this final result is the
outcome of a definite plan which had been contained in the initial
shock, as the future development of a live creature is said to be
contained in the genes of its germ cell. 

[...]

The passage from the dissociative stage to the associative one is thus
marked by a spiritual thrill which in English is very loosely termed
Inspiration. [...] 
The whole thing lasts one radiant second and the motion of impressions
and images is so swift that you cannot check the exact law which attend
their recognition, formation, and fusion [...] it is like a jigsaw
puzzle that instantly comes together in your brain with the brain itself
unable to observe how and why the pieces fit, and you experience a
shuddering sensation of wild magic, of some inner resurrection, as if a
dead man were revived by a sparkling drug which has been rapidly mixed
in your presence. This feeling is at the base of what is called
inspiration--a state of affairs that commonsense must condemn. 

[...]

Many people who are not writers are familiar with such experiences;
others simply do not bother to note them. In my example memory played an
essential though unconscious part and everything depended upon the
perfect fusion of the past and the present. The inspiration of genius
adds a third ingredient: it the past and the present And the future
(your book) that comes together in a sudden flash; thus the entire
circle
of time is perceived, which is another way of saying time ceases to
exist. It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering
you and of yourself dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is
the
prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the nonego rushing
in from the outside to save the prisoner--who is already dancing in the
open. 

The Russian language which otherwise is comparatively poor in abstract
terms, supplies definitions of the two types of inspiration, Vostorg and
Vdokhnovenie, which can be paraphrased as "rapture" and "recapture." The
difference between them is mainly of a climatic kind, the first being
hot
and brief, the second cool and sustained. The kind alluded to up to now
is the pure flame of Vostorg, initial rapture, which has no conscious
purpose in view but which is all-important in linking the breaking up of
the old world with the building of the the new one. When the time is
ripe and the writer settles down to the actual composing of the book, he
will rely on the second serene and steady kind of inspiration,
Vdokhnovenie, the trusted mate who helps to recapture and reconstruct
the world. 

>From VN's "The Art of Literature and Commonsense" 
_Lectures On Literature_
Edited by Fredson Bowers
Introduction by John Updike
Paper ISBN 0-15-649589-9

Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles 
and animates his creature. He must, of course, 
be a little vague about the details,
but we're left with a procedure that seems to include surgery,
electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic extravaganzas), 
chemistry, even, from dark
hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, 
the still recently discredited form of
magic known as alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly
depicted Bolt Through the Neck, 
is that neither the method nor the creature that
results is mechanical.
This is one of several interesting 
similarities between Frankenstein and
an earlier tale of the Bad and Big, 
The Castle of Otranto (1765), by
Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the first Gothic novel. 
For one thing, both
authors, in presenting their books to the 
public, used voices not their
own. Mary Shelley's preface was written by her husband, 
Percy, who was pretending
to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write an introduction to
Frankenstein in herown voice. Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book
an entire made-up publishing history, claiming it was a translation from
medieval Italian. Only in his preface to the 
second edition did he admit authorship.
The novels are also of strikingly similar nocturnal origin: both
resulted from episodes of lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story
summer in Geneva, trying to get to 
sleep one midnight, suddenly beheld the
creature being brought to life, the 
images arising in her mind "with a
vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie." 
Walpole had been awakened from a
dream, "of which, all I could remember was, 
that I had thought myself in an ancient castle
... and that on the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw a
gigantic hand in armour." In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the
hand of Alfonso the Good, 
former Prince of Otranto and, despite his epithet, the
castle's resident Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is
assembled from pieces
-- sable-plumed helmet, foot, leg, sword, 
all of them, like the hand, quite
oversized -- which fall from the sky or just materialize here and there
about the castle grounds, relentless as Freud's slow return of the
repressed. The activating agencies, again like 
those in Frankenstein, are
non-mechanical. The final assembly of "the form of Alfonso, dilated to
an immense magnitude," is achieved through 
supernatural means: a family curse, and
the intercession of Otranto's patron saint.

TRP's "Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?"
The New York Times Book Review
28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.