Theories of Creativity in a Historical Lens

James William Anderson outlines two claims about artistic creativity and considers Arthur Miller’s writing of The Crucible to illustrate his claims: 1) Artists create from their intense inner conflicts, even when the surface form in which those are depicted appears more explicitly linked to political or social events. 2) A work of art—a play in this instance—is successful to the extent that the audience has a corresponding inner conflict that permits them to share the feelings the author depicts. In our response, we examine Anderson’s claims in relation to other authors and other times, to illustrate some features of those claims that can be addressed in the future.

An account of artistic creativity is strengthened by drawing both from psychological perspectives and from the within discipline work of theorists who examine and analyze distinct types of creative works, such as literary critics or musicologists, as well as those who play significant roles in the production and display of the works—the dramaturge and actors, among others, in the case of theater. Cutting across many of those specific disciplines is a historicist perspective, which involves examining concepts and creations with an eye to the historical contexts in which they were cre-

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ated.

If we consider issues of historical context with respect to Anderson’s claims, we can raise some questions about when and how these claims can be applied across different historical eras. Conceptions of art and artists that assume an individual’s singularity in the creation of poetry, novels, plays, paintings, or song are relatively new in historical terms. Art previously referred primarily to knowledge—and then to the liberal arts tradition in the classical sense—before it took on the sense of a work produced by a unique or creative form of genius. This aspect of the historical context raises questions about whether, and in what ways, the work of other creative individuals, such as scientists, may also reflect deeply felt internal struggles of the creator. Or, is the theory specific to art and artists as understood in the modern era?

Arthur Miller and his work are firmly located within this era, which means that conceptions of authors for Miller and his contemporaries involve certain features. These include the identification of authors with their work and the idea that such work is the intellectual property of the artist—an understanding of authorship that is linked historically to the emergence of copyright laws. We tend to view works, rightly or wrongly, as connected with single creators. With this understanding of authorship, it makes great sense that an author’s work is a reflection, however transformed, of his or her deeply felt internal conflicts. Further, in the modernist era we have access to biographical information—and even autobiographical information—that illuminates inner conflicts. What are we to do in the case of writers like Shakespeare, for whom we have less direct access to accounts of their internal conflicts to help illuminate their work?

Shakespeare also raises another issue. Drama as a genre has always been a collaborative endeavor, even in the case of the playwright often thought of as the greatest artist of all time. Though Shakespeare’s plays may be viewed by us as the work of a solitary genius, the fact is that at least five of his plays bear evidence of collaboration (Brian Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-author: A Historical Study of Five Collaborative Plays, 2004). One quarto printed in the 17^th century features his name along with that of another playwright—John Fletcher—and scholars have detected traces of multi-

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ple hands in other works as well. Even Macbeth contains a scene that many scholars have argued was written by Thomas Middleton. Shakespeare also drew extensively on classical and other early modern texts in creating his dramatic plots and monologues.

In the contemporary world, consider the children’s television show Phineas and Ferb. Episodes are written collaboratively by the original creators, as well as others, but also draw extensively on references to previous works and popular culture. Our own autobiographical memories are themselves co-authored works, whether or not we are aware of this fact (see Monisha Pasupathi and Timothy Hoyt, “The Development of Narrative Identity in Late Adolescence and Emergent Adulthood: The Continued Importance of Listeners,” Developmental Psychology, 45(2), 2009, pp. 558-574).

How does the collaborative aspect of authorship affect the claim of a work’s reflecting the internal conflicts of a single individual? Are multi-authored works reflective of shared or divergent internal conflicts? Does it matter whether collaboration is the default understanding of authorship, or is a hidden, less salient aspect of how a work is created? Does the negotiation of multiple authors’ shared internal conflicts—or of their divergent ones—determine whether such collaboration is eventually successful—by whatever terms we might define success?

Does success depend on capturing an audience via shared internal conflicts? Ultimately, of course, economic success surely figures in the motives of many artists—and that means that capturing the audience in some way is likely to be a key concern. The concerns that audiences bring to bear on plays—or indeed, any work of art—are colored and shaped by their sociohistorical contexts as well as their internal conflicts, as are the ways that plays are staged and presented in different eras. Are internal conflicts as central to a play’s success in moving the audience to feel when there are large sociopolitical issues at stake?

To raise these historicist perspectives is not to suggest that we disagree with the claims Anderson is making. Rather, these perspectives suggest something important for the development and further refinement of the claims. For Anderson’s perspective on artistic creativity to approximate the truth requires that the kinds of in-

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ner conflicts that motivate artists and make an audience capable of being moved are not infinite in their variety. Rather, it suggests that there must be some limited set of human internal conflicts that are recognizable across historical eras and across individuals.

One useful project would be to build on extant work and elucidate what those conflicts might be. It may be fruitful in the development of this approach to creativity to draw not only on psychologically informed understandings of conflict, but also to examine the work of literary theorists, especially those who take a biographical approach to their work. The unique contribution of psychological theorists to this endeavor could be to integrate the diverse psychological theories of conflicts, as well as the more specific formulations of such conflicts that likely exist in the work of literary and other theorists, who focus primarily on a single individual rather than on accounting for creativity more broadly. Psychoanalysts and psychologists are also uniquely situated to provide empirical explorations of such conflicts—how they arise in the development of a person and how they may be transformed within various media to result in creativity. We will be interested to see how the initial claims in Anderson’s paper develop in relation to issues of media, historical context, and collaboration.

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