Creativity: Making Connections, Part II

In my last blog, I talked about how to make creative connections. I want to pursue the idea of making

connections, seeing parallels and analogies and exploiting them, and I want to do so by focusing on the most basic fantastical connection that human race knows. It is ancient, found in the literature of most cultures of the world (I would even say all cultures). It is very present today. The thing to which I refer is making animals into characters—giving them human abilities and using them to illustrate vices, virtues, and numerous other attributes.

Examples are abundant—from Aesop to Huckleberry Hound—but I want to start with a poem by C. S. Lewis that maybe gets to the core of why this is so attractive to us and so much of a basic creative move. The poem is called “Impenitence.” In it, the speaker says he will not “repent” of his love of stories that involve talking animals, even though critics and intellectuals say they are not for adults and are silly and juvenile. The poem is too long to quote here in its entirety, but one section is particularly instructive. Lewis’s narrator says

                                               

                                    Look again. Look well at the beasts, the true ones.
                                    Can't you see?...cool primness of cats, or coney's
                                    Half indignant stare of amazement, mouse's
                                    Twinkling adroitness,

                                    Tipsy bear's rotundity, toad's complacence...
                                    Why! they all cry out to be used as symbols,
                                    Masks for Man, cartoons, parodies by Nature
                                    Formed to reveal us

                                    Each to each, not fiercely but in her gentlest
                                    Vein of household laughter . . .

Animals, he tells us, “cry out to be used as symbols.” We all recognize it. If we have pets, we’ve done just what the poem says. We’ve attributed human characteristics to animals. We’ve seen them as examples, archetypes of humans, and as “parodies of Nature / Formed to reveal us.”

The human race caught on to this early. Tribal cultures had their “trickster” stories of the fox or

coyote. Brer Rabbit (Brother Rabbit) is example of an African trickster figure brought to America by captives transported here from there who adapted the tales to our own culture. Native American tribes abounded in such trickster stories. Going further on, Aesop told animal fables in ancient Greece.

In the Middle Ages, there were “bestiaries,” books that taught moral lessons using the animal world (beasts). We still recite vestiges from those books:  the idea that an ostrich hides its head in the sand when afraid is from medieval bestiaries. Talking animals come to us today, whether it’s Scooby-Do (well, he doesn’t talk exactly), Buggs Bunny, or Sponge Bob.

From this, we glean that for creative, entertaining stories, human beings have always relied on analogy; that is, storytellers noticed similarities and use these similarities to create entertaining or enlightening tales. In a world where animals abounded and human beings had a great deal of contact with them, the connections were an obvious choice.

Donkeys were patient and stubborn; lions were ferocious; foxes were sly and crafty; horses were true-blue. Out of these similarities of animals to humans, stories were born. By connecting something outside the boundaries of human life with things inside human life, we could learn about ourselves. Maybe this is where imagination and creativity first came about. It’s still with us today.

We continued to use animal characters. But we can take it beyond this. I’ve noted how Neil Gaiman exploited the similarities between the homeless and supernatural beings in his novel Neverwhere. Though J. R. R. Tolkien adamantly insisted Lord of the Rings was not a political allegory, it seems plausible that the easy-going, food-loving citizens of England inspired hobbits; and the aggressive, rapacious, militaristic figures the British fought and World War I and World War II suggested the Evil Races of Middle Earth. He made the connections, at least to some extent, and used them to create one of the greatest stories of all time.

So notice the connections.

I’ll have one more blog on this subject and then go on to some other things related to creativity.

For some creative connections, check out my books.

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