The Psychology of Artistic Creativity

An Existential-Phenomenological Study

Bjarne Sode Funch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000528534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Creative Ability in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This ground-breaking book provides a unique insight into artistic creativity that lays the foundation for a new theory. Through a review of documents such as essays, published interviews, lecture notes, and more, the book uses case studies of six contemporary artists to provide a detailed phenomenological study of artistic creativity.

The book offers a narrative account of six contemporary artists and their ways of approaching art-making. Through comprehensive accounts based on the individual artist's descriptions, the book reveals an existential dimension of art-making that explores the inspirational moment, the state of mind during creativity, how creativity can originate in a spontaneous stream of consciousness, and how emotions play a major role in the creative process. The book sets out a unique understanding of artistic creativity as an alternative to the prevailing cognitive conceptions within psychology.

Offering novel insights into how art is created and can influence the human psyche, the book will primarily appeal to academics, scholars, and post-graduate students within the area of creativity research, psychological aesthetics, and the psychology of art, as well as those with an interest in art and artistic work.

Part one

Phenomenological studies of artistic creativity

Chapter 1

Solitude is writing

Marguerite Duras on creative writing

DOI: 10.4324/9781003248576-3

The author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras was born in 1914 in French Indochina, a region that today is a southern part of Vietnam. Her parents were schoolteachers in the French colonial service. She had two brothers, Paulo and Pierre, who were three and four years older than her, respectively. When she was seven years old her father died, leaving them in financial distress. Their family life was characterized by contrasting moments of love and hatred, dominated by Duras’ oldest brother who bullied the entire family but was still her mother’s favorite. When she was fifteen, Duras was sent to high school in Saigon and after graduating, at the age of seventeen, she moved to Paris to study mathematics, law, and political science at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. She never returned to Indochina.

Duras married Robert Antelme in 1939. They were both in the French Resistance, and Robert was arrested in 1944 and deported to a German concentration camp. After his return, the couple divorced in 1946 and that same year Duras married Dionys Mascolo, with whom she gave birth to her only son, Jean, in 1947. However, in 1980, she met a younger man, Yann Andrea Steiner, with whom she lived until her death in 1996.

Duras’ first novel, Les Impudents, was published in 1943. During the 1950s, she wrote ten novels, among them Moderato Cantabile (1958), which was made into a film starring Jeanne Moreau and Jean Belmondo. In 1960, Duras wrote the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour, commissioned by the film director Alain Resnais. India Song (1975), a film directed by Duras herself, was originally written as a play (1973) commissioned for the National Theatre of Great Britain. The plot refers to a relationship Duras heard about in her childhood, which also inspired her novel Le Vice-Consul (1965) and heavily influenced the films Nathalie Granger (1972) and La Femme du Gange (1973), both written and directed by Duras.

Duras was an alcoholic for many years and went to various rehab clinics several times. In 1980, she was hospitalized for the first time. When she recovered, she wrote more than fifteen books, and L´amant (The Lover), written in 1984, was among them. The novel reveals the romantic relationship between a pubescent girl from a French family and an older, wealthy Chinese man. This story is retold in L´amant de la Chine du Nord (The North China Lover, 1991), and a similar relationship is touched upon in one of Duras’ earlier novels, Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall), from 1950.

Duras was not only a novelist and filmmaker but also a journalist. She wrote many essays and articles during her lifetime. Among them is an essay on writing, Ecrire (Writing) (1993), which is the primary source for the following account of Duras’ approach to creative writing. This essay originated as a filmed conversation with Benoit Jacquot, a French filmmaker.

Place of solitude

In 1958, Marguerite Duras bought a house in Neauphle-le-Château, a village on the outskirts of Paris, in order to have a place where she could write in solitude. She wanted to be alone and far away from everything, so the forty-four hundred square foot farmhouse with fourteen empty rooms was ideal. The house had a beautiful big garden, which she was fond of. Outside you cannot be alone, Duras claims, because there are birds and cats.¹

In this house, in a single room, Duras writes her most important works. She calls it “my room” and she begins to write in the morning, every day, but without a schedule. For a long time, she only works on the second floor, but later she writes in the living room on the ground floor, where she can see the garden. She arranges everything in a specific order and maintains the same habits. She uses the same chair and the same black ink every time she writes.

Duras creates her own solitude by closing the doors, shutting off the telephone, and not speaking for hours as she writes.² In her essay on writing, one gets the impression that she creates this place of solitude unintentionally. She says that this “loss of myself in the house was in no way voluntary.”³ It is what she needs it to be for her own creative process. Years later, she becomes conscious of the reasons why she secluded herself in this way.

Duras describes the importance of solitude for her writing in the following passage:

Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you. To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea for a book, is to find yourself, once again, before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome. I believe that the person who writes does not have any ideas for a book, that her hands are empty, her head is empty, and that all she knows of this adventure, this book, is dry, naked writing, without a future, without echo, distant, with only its elementary golden rules: spelling, meaning.⁴

This quote by Duras is so dense with meaning that it needs to be unpacked gradually.

One could easily get the impression that Duras closed herself off in a monastic fashion. It could appear that she was in a cell without any distractions but that is only partly true. The house faces out to a garden that Duras loves to watch and there is a pond close by that freezes in the winter. Children come to skate on the pond and the writer watches them. Duras follows how light changes over the day and over the seasons. It is remarkable how closely attentive she is to the nature and life surrounding her. Her solitude seems to create an extraordinary sensitivity to her environment. She recalls how when she is alone she recognizes objects that one usually doesn’t pay much attention to, like a radiator, and in her essay on writing she gives a long and detailed account of the death of a fly. These are observations that seem to be facilitated by her life in solitude.

However, Duras claims, “a solitary house doesn’t simply exist.”⁵ And by this, she means every house has its history and Duras makes an effort to look into the past life of the house and who its inhabitants were. Both trivial stories and major events such as marriages and deaths are closely attached to the spirit of a house and Duras is very much attuned to this.

While the house in Neauphle provided the physical frame for Duras’ writing, her social life is another aspect that influenced her work.

Separation from others

When Duras bought the house, she thought of it as a place to spend time with friends, and it often was, but mainly it turned out to be a place for writing in solitude. When her friends were invited, up to fifteen at a time would come, Duras would ask a few people to come early to help her move the tables into another room so they could all gather. These were delightful occasions for everyone, and she remembers them as some of her happiest memories.⁶ Duras did not close herself off from people in town either. She went shopping for her daily needs and met with the locals. She recalls that she sometimes went out late at night and that she loved those meandering walks under the stars with people from the village. She also frequented the village café and pub to drink and talk with the locals.⁷ Although many friends came to see her and she went into the village, the author retained her solitude, and she was often silent for extended periods.

When Duras is writing, her writing is everywhere. “Everything wrote,” as she phrases it.⁸ During periods of writing, she cannot be social. She hardly recognizes her own friends, even close ones. She felt horrible about cutting them off, but she had to write. When Yann Andrea Steiner, who would become Duras’ companion for the last sixteen years of her life, called to say that he would visit her in Neauphle for the first time, she was terrified. “At that time of my life, for someone to come see me like that, from far away, was a terrifying prospect. It’s true. I’ve never spoken about my solitude in that period of my life.”⁹ Yann’s visit came at a time when Duras had been living in almost monastic solitude for ten years, but it was also one of the most productive periods of her life.

Occasionally, when she did have friends staying with her, Duras explains how she reacted to their company by cooking in the early afternoon when they were out for a walk or asleep in their rooms. She writes:

Then I had all the ground floor of the house and the garden to myself. It was then I saw most clearly that I loved them and wished them well. I can recall the kind of silence there was after they went out. To enter that silence was like entering the sea. At once a happiness and a very precise state of abandonment to an evolving idea. A way of thinking or perhaps of not thinking – the two things are not so far apart. And also of writing.¹⁰

Often the ingredients for soup were already bought in the morning, and Duras would carefully prepare the fresh vegetables, put the soup on, and then get to her writing.

Duras never let anyone interfere with her work. Even her lovers were not allowed to read a text she was working on and she never dictated to a secretary. She emphasizes that even the slightest intrusion into her writing, the slightest opinion from another, wo...