Art Speaking to its Artist

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A couple of months ago a friend and former work partner of mine paid a visit. For some reason we began to talk about writing "You seem always to be able to create the feeling and atmosphere that you want in what you write," he generously told me. "I have written a lot lately, about things I feel very intensely about, but it seems to me that I cannot convey my emotions to the reader."

As we discussed this for a while, his problem became clear to me. He tried to convey feelings by saying he was angry, or sad, or happy.

IN everyday life people are preoccupied with how they shall relate to their surroundings. Their reaction patterns are developed as answers to challenges in their existence. They find a way of reacting to angry people, a way of reacting to happy people, a way of reacting to cold people. Throughout life they build an entire library of reaction patterns; one reaction for every type of situation they have been forced to tackle.

But the reaction pattern for angry people is not triggered when someone say to you: "Angry!". It is triggered when you are face to face with an angry person.

If you want your reader to feel the presence of angry people, it is not enough to say "There are angry people in the room." You have to confont them with these angry people; you have to recreate the behaviour of angry people in what you write.

Then the reaction pattern of the reader is triggered.

THIS leads us to what I consider one of the central problems for artists -- and not only writers. Their job is not just to interpret reality, as is natural to us as social beings. They are to recreate it. And in recreating it they have to understand how it works -- not just how to react to it.

It becomes a task of the artist to have an understanding of the inner laws of reality so they can create a surface that is believable. The believable surface is needed to trigger reader or audience reactions.

ONE may, of course, say that triggering reactions is quite easy. The spectator only needs to be confronted with key elements of the situation for that to happen.

Taken one step further, though, one may ponder that as we are very used to reality, we are good at recognizing what is real and what is not. Even beyond what triggers reactions in us.

This sense of what is real, we can use to judge our understanding of reality. Flaws in the surface of our work, are signs of flaws in the inner dynamics of it, which are signs that there is something we have not understood.

Suddenly the artistic work becomes more than a means to move the reader or specator. It becomes a tool for exploring the inner laws of reality, and to test out our theories about it.

OR we can go the other way.

We can search for the key elements that trigger our reactions. We can experiment on how far we can deviate from reality, and still trigger reactions. We can try to find ways to trigger stronger reactions than they one get through exact reconstruction of reality.

Even so, practitioners are still caught by this one basic truth:

Their most important material for creating reactions in spectators are the reaction patterns these have developed in confrontation with their everyday life.