Creativity: Transcending Genre, The Book of Genesis

One of the most creative moves ever done is found 

in the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis.  

This post will not in any way argue the finer points of the narrative there, but try to show how the author creatively uses the story of how God made the universe to emphasize a theological point. Whatever you believe the Book of Genesis means, the strategy of the author in the first part of it is a brilliant, flashy creative move—in the story about the Earth’s creation.

Whether we’re religious or not, a Jew or Christian or something else, most people are familiar with the opening lines of the Bible:  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The simplicity and beauty of that line is well known, but there was a strategy behind it. It was not merely for the sake of simplicity.

The sole character in that first sentence is God. He created the heavens and the earth—the sky and the land. Period. That’s it. This is where the creativity comes on.

What creativity? The writer begins with something that would have been startling in that day and age. When he made the heavens and the earth, God didn’t have to fight anybody. He did it with no help and encountered no opposition. This stood in contradistinction with most of the other creation stories of the day.

Usually a deity had to fight to create the universe—or to get control of a pre-existing universe that had simply made itself by arising out of some primal chaos. Zeus and the Olympian gods had to fight the Titans, a race of older gods led by Kronos, to get sovereignty over the earth. Once he had killed or imprisoned them, he and his brothers, Poseidon and Hades, divided the spoils and set up their various realms. In Babylonian mythology, Apsu and Tiamat bring into being the Earth and everything connected with it. Soon, however, one of their children, Ea, rebels and eventually kills Apsu. Ea marries and fathers Marduk, the chief Babylonian god. Conflict seems to go along with making a world.

Apsu

Not for the God in the Hebrew scriptures. He doesn’t have to fight anyone. He doesn’t have children who will rise up against him. It’s an easy, smooth, motionless action to make a universe. It involves no conflict, no fighting. God has no rivals, no opponents. This implies, of course, the Hebrew belief that their God was in a class by himself, not one deity among many.

The author accomplishes this through a simple, straightforward text that charms by its eloquence. He does not boast about his (or her) God being more powerful than other deities. God makes heaven and the earth by speaking them into being. By the simplicity of his discourse, the author powerfully, and creatively, drives home his theological point.

The Book of Genesis was written probably around 4000 years ago. The techniques of creativity don’t change.

Creavity: Transcending Genre II

Novelist Evelyn Waugh is once said the only good 

thing about the Twentieth Century was the invention

of the electric light—because by it we are able to stay up all night and read Victorian novels. The Victorian novel I read and re-read is one that creatively bent the rules and taboos of Victorian literature and introduced startling characters and concepts. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, excels all other novels of its time in creative reach.

The Victorian era was an era of propriety. Sex was not mentioned, nor was the body. Furthermore, people were expected to restrain themselves. One of Dickens’ characters is falling in love and tells herself, Now, Esther:  duty, duty, duty. You lived to be a useful person and set aside your passion for respectability. Emily Brontë broke with this—at least in the one novel she published.

The teacup world of Jane Austen and the propriety of Dickens are blown out of the water in Wuthering Heights. It amazes the reader by the torrents of passion from her main character Heathcliff and his love, Katherine.

She shatters Victorian convention by making Heathcliff a passionate, emotional character, almost demonic in his drive to marry Katherine, whom he does not wed, and whom he spends the rest of his life trying to win her over from her husband. He rages, swears, swells with anger and violence. He is driven by primal love, which, when denied him, turns to primal rage and thirst for revenge. Katherine loves him the same way but bows to convention and chooses not to marry him. She is destroyed by this.

Rebuffed, Heathcliff goes on a lifelong mission to exact revenge on the people who kept him and Katherine apart. He gets control of Katherine’s and Edgar, her husband’s, son and make him an illiterate farmhand so he can scoff at him. He gains control of all the farms around him and oppresses his neighbor. His own wife, who bears him a son, deserts him, and then dies, writes in a letter, “Is Heathcliff a devil, or a man?”

 This sort of intensity is not seen in other Victorian novels. Brontë creatively pushes her characters to new heights of passion and intensity. She was also highly creative in structuring the novel.

It begins with three of the craziest chapters in literature. A man seeks refuge at Heathcliff’s home and enters a bewildering scene of violence and conflict. He stays at the house and has a bizarre dream related to a text he has just read; and then another dream based on a puzzling entry written in the margin of the pamphlet. He tells Heathcliff about the dream and his reaction is violent and then pathetic as he stands at an open window and weeps, ““Come in! Come in! Kathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! My heart's darling! Hear me this time, Katherine, at last!”

 The man returns home, is ill, and is told the story of what happens by the housekeeper who nurses him back to health. By the end of her long narrative, we finally understand what happens in the first three chapters. It is a marvel of framing and structuring a work of literature. The imagery of the dreams and the unfolding narrative of Heathcliff are nothing short of amazing.

Emily Brontë seemed quite conventional from her time. But underneath the propriety she displayed was a creative genius whose vast capacity for creating wonder would not fit into Victorian strictures. Wuthering Heights still ranks as one of the most amazing novels I’ve read even thought it was written 167 years ago. Creativity triumphs over time—as we will see in the next blog about a text that succeeds through skillful use of it. 

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Creativity: Transcending Genre

Creativity can find its expression not just in fantasy or science fiction. Imaginative approaches make for remarkable works of conventional fiction—literary fiction or whatever we chose to call it. Taking a standard form and giving it a creative twist is an operation of enduring masterpieces. It also can make for powerful literature, as we shall see in our example for today’s blog.

When I list my ten favorite novels—or the ten novels that have changed my viewpoint and are embedded in my memory as moving and profound, and as exemplars of fictional craft—One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) usually gets the #1 spot.. As you might glean from the title and the author’s name, it is a Russian novel (but a short one, about 150 pages). Written in 1962, it helped bring about the fall of the repressive Soviet Union. 

We could go into a lot of detail about the novel, but what I want to focus on is its creative innovation. This novel emerged out of the great mass of Russian literature to become an international bestseller because of its creative approach to the genre—the fiction category it fits into.

That category is political literature. I detest political literature. Political novels, stories, and poems resemble listening to an evangelist who is trying to convert you. The authors in political novels preach. Like most preachers, they offer simple analyses of complex issues, valorize their side in the debate, and vilify the opposition. Political fiction is, for this reason, boring and predictable (politically oriented poetry is even worse).

A second genre category the novel fits in is the prison novel. Ivan Denisovich is an inmate in a Siberian prison camp for political dissidents.

Here is where it gets creative.

The author does not paint a dire, shocking, disheartening picture of prisoners toiling in the subzero landscape of the gulag work camp—well, not exactly. They are working in freezing cold in a desolate place and have no rights and are oppressed. But the novel is . . .  funny, hopeful, winsome, and charming. How can a novel about prisoners in a detention camp in northern Russia be charming? This is what Solzhenitsyn’s creative art managed to do. 

Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn

 The point of view character is Ivan Denisovich (that would be John Denison in English). He is your typical, average Russian dude—blue collar, uneducated, but possessing the simple good average Joes often possess. This is Solzhenitsyn’s first creative marvel. Rather than creating a suffering, bitter, cynical prisoner who rails against the political forces depriving him of liberty, he presents a patient, humble, shrewd, adroit man with the wisdom of a peasant who capably navigates the treacherous currents of prison camp life. Ivan is the Artful Dodger of the gulag. He does well—as well as one can do in such an environment. This unexpected protagonist who breaks out of the typical character mold for this sort of novel is compelling and fascinating. One approaches the text expecting a litany of despair. Instead, the reader falls in love with a funny, bright, man, simple but remarkable in his insight and ability.

Next, Solzhenitsyn makes the novel an allegory and yet keeps it tone modern and realistic. Ivan is an Everyman character; and, as in medieval allegory, there are lots of allegorical figures:  Buinovsky, the Captain; Turin, the Squad Leader; Tzezar, the Artist; Alyosha, the Baptist; Fetikov, the Jackal (or the Scavenger); Gopchik, the Kid. All have been imprisoned on false charges, just as Ivan Denisovich has. Allegorical figures in medieval literature are wooden and one-dimensional. These characters, however, are human and real. This is another of the book’s creative surprises.

Lastly, Solzhenitsyn creatively interdicts expectation by transforming the book from what one assumes will be a grim, dreary text about oppression and brutality into something else. Don’t get me wrong. It is about oppression and brutality, but his creative approach changes it over to a celebration of the human spirit. The system has broken none of these characters. The human spirit is stronger than the oppressive forces that would crush it. Evil is stupid, clumsy, and unimaginative; good is innovative, sly, and triumphant. The human spirit is strong. In the end, it will win.

And it did win! One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich called worldwide attention to the crimes of Soviet regime. In the 1980s, that government collapsed. The Soviet Union became Russia once more. Solzhenitsyn’s book, many contend, was instrumental in bringing this collapse about by exposing the nature of the government ruling Russia at that time. 

Scene from a film version of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Creativity is powerful.

I’ll have more on this, and on literary fiction that pitched creative curve balls, in my next blog.

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More to come on creativity. 

Creativity: Making Connections, Part III

Last blog, I talked about how one of the earliest creative leaps the human race made was the equation of animal behavior with human behavior. From the trickster stories of coyote and fox the native American tribes told, to the “brother rabbit tales” originally from Nigeria, to Aesop’s fables and onward, the obvious connection between human and animal traits were exploited in story. One of the best examples of this, and one of the most instructive for creative writers, was Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

If you haven’t read this story, it is about a group of animal friends. Okay, that’s easy enough, but Grahame performs a tour de force by carrying the story much further than the simple correlation that has been the mainstay of storytelling for millennia. He expands links between human and animal behavior in ingenious and innovative ways.

His characters have personalities, as we might expect. But he weaves his characters out of traits that are already there. Water Rat, his main character, is “cool”—not in the slang sense we use it today, but he is calm, even, and temperate. Rat befriends Mole. Mole is a bit obtuse (moles are almost blind), stodgy, and plodding, but has a great heart. They meet Rat’s friends: Badger, who, in his own way, is vicious (badgers are not nice animals if you encounter one). Last of all, there is Toad. Toad is an egotist. He is “puffed up,” as toads will be.

All the creatures, then, take on personalities suggested by the appearance or behavior of the animal they are. But Grahame goes further. He places them in a social setting. They live in the woods, but not entirely. Rat has a boat. The animals live in houses. Mr. Toad is rich and lives on an estate. Apparently (though you don’t get a lot of information on this) they interact with humans and the humans don’t seem to think their presence odd. The animals constitute their own little society. In fact, Toad’s out-of-control behavior is, according to Badger, “giving us a bad name.” He is harming the social reputation of the animals in England.

This is funny, and the animals cross backward to remind us of human types we know. A sequence of hilarious events unfolds. Toad, who is wasting his money on gadgets, becomes enamored of the newfangled motorcar, gets in accidents, and eventually steals a car and is thrown in jail. He escapes and gets home only to find his estate has been taken over by unseemly animals—weasels, stoats, and foxes—and he must fight to get it back. His animal friends help him.

The theme of the book is friendship. The animals care for each other. They are considerate of each others' needs and feelings. They love each other.

I like art about friendship. Stand By Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and Tombstone are three of my favorite films because they are largely about friendship. There is no better book on friendship than The Wind in the Willows. It is not only funny, but a touching and moving tale about human (in the guise of animal) friendships.

What is the ultimate experience of friendship? One afternoon, Mole and Rat are out in Rat’s boat and

experience the ultimate:  they see God. The god of animals is Pan and the two of them encounter him. In a magnificently written piece that stuns me with its creative imagery, the little creatures are overwhelmed by Pan’s presence. The god—knowing that nothing in life will be wonderful for the two animals after the supreme experience of seeing him and being in his presence—makes them forget what they have just known so they can go on being happy. Instead of hearing Pan’s pipe and his song, they only hear “the wind in the willows” as they go their way.

How did he think of that?

But if you’re making a story out of connections between humans and animals, humans have always been religious. They have always had “theodicies,” moments when they see God or the gods or the spirits. Why not animals as well? And what would it be like to see the Supreme Being? It would be difficult to convey that via a human character, but an animal character opens the door to such a description. And Grahame does with a masterful hand.

So, I’ve made the point in three blogs that one facilitates creativity by seeing connections, links, and analogies—between the homeless and supernatural creatures, between animals and humans, between the content of rock songs and the paranormal. Add whatever else presents itself to your imagination. Look for the connections. This is one path to writing creatively.

Next, I want to look at other ways writers have been creative in what they did with genre, subject matter, and other literary conventions. Stay tuned.

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