The Domain of the World is Five People Large

While specific analysis and quotations from five different authors bring up poignant examples and driving forces behind the “need” to write, Csikzekntmihaly’s blanket assumptions of how the “artist” is or how the “artistic” mind works are frustratingly one-dimensional. Being that he is not a creative writer, I would be looking for him to collect diverse and far-reaching data in order to come up with commonalities among processes. Instead, he sites five writers, three of which are poets and two novelists, one of science fiction. All of the writers sited were primarily famous in the United States and all were Caucasian. The lack of diversity and the very limited size of the pool of writers Csikzekntmihaly sited as the sources of his grand generalizations on creative process and domain, lack applicability to a giant portion of the world.

Csikzekntmihaly claims to deploy on a specific domain analysis in order to see “what is involved in producing a cultural change.” (237) He writes that there is an obvious distinction between “poet and novelist,” (238) which is not true of experimental forms and arguable even of other more traditional forms. This assumption also infers that a writer is either a “poet” or a “writer” which is also a lame and false statement. For instance, novels such as Carole Maso’s Aureole, Duras’ The Lover or Ron Silliman’s narrative poems (Ketjak) arguably harbor elements of both narrative and poetry. Without specification to what type of literature Csikzekntmihaly is analyzing, this is a very vague and pointless statement, especially as he implies the word “obviously.”

In Csikzekntmihaly’s opinion, from the position of non-creative-writer, literature is interesting because due to the “powerful” words used to create stories that “enrich life by expanding the range of individual experience.” He also claims that “the written word allows us to understand better what is happening within ourselves…. poetry and literature… take our lives to higher levels of complexity.” (238) Csikzekntmihaly sites various writers to strengthen his viewpoint as to why literature and writing are important. One trait he stresses is the dichotomy between intellect and intuition, expressed by Madeleine L’Engle as a balance where “intuition and intellect” are “making love.” The perspective is presented that ideas are not created but re-molded or re-invented in personalized ways. In this way Csikzekntmihaly claims that writers “think of themselves as gardeners whose task is to cultivate perennial ideas generation after generation.” All of these assessments are extremely subversive and given that his analysis are based on all-American poetry and prose written by Caucasian writers, where does the rest of the world find their explanation of process?

Csikzekntmihaly makes another alarming generalization in saying that “like most creative people, he (Mark Strand) does not take himself too seriously. I take issue with this sweeping statement as it does not represent the individual at all. Csikzekntmihaly contradicts his point that individuals bring their own view points to art and writing by saying that all artistic people are one “collective” way. (240) In further describing Strand’s creative process he states that “this is the problem-finding process that is typical of creative work in the arts.” (241) Are all artists problem solving? I can’t help but think of nihilists and writers of “underground characters” such as Dostoevsky who displayed human conditions of neurosis and did not provide a viable solution to them. There was a “double” character as a portrayal of disparate halves, but this was not necessarily a solution. It seems that equally, narratives and writers’ objectives in writing could be presented as problem-posing. I don’t quite know if this is a moot point, based on a game of semantics I am playing with Csikzekntmihaly, but it seems to me that his assertions of a creative mind are very limited in scope.

A second thing that Csikzekntmihaly is doing in “The Domain of the World” is psychoanalyzing the perspectives brought forth by the authors themselves. For instance, Mark Strand writes that “I don’t write to find out more about myself. I write because it amuses me.” In the very next sentence Csikzekntmihaly goes on to state “But amusement seems like a radical understatement for the way Strand experiences writing.” An abundance of psycho babble becomes inhibitive when applied to literary process and literature itself. For instance, in the case of the experimental novel or narrative, analysis of a psycho-analytic kind is often counter productive to actually grasping the meaning\value\ process\ of the novel. As Gayle Elliot argues in “Pedagogy in Penumbra: Teaching, Writing and Feminism in the Fiction Workshop” that in speaking about writing and quantifying it “women” need “to take back the language of political transformation and redefine its terms” (140 Colors of a Different Horse) literature is not quantifiable in the terms of any other arena of life and therefore demands its own language and own means of measuring. If this is to be believed, experimental work then demands structures and critiques specific to its realm, ones that address what its mission is, rather than subjugating other standards from a domain whose aims diverge largely from those of the model domain.

Csikzekntmihaly writes that L’Engle “showed her creativity... by being able to turn a disadvantage into an advantage,” an example of one of his broad interpretations of one writer’s creative process. (254) Only in one out of five of his examples does he mention the direct importance of the domain. In Richard Stern’s analysis, Csikzekntmihaly writes that he “had a literary society, a literary magazine- in short, all the makings of a small field.” He emphasizes the importance of these things as “they provide benchmarks… offer competition… provide helpful criticism…. open up opportunities.. . essential to one’s advancement.” To make a generalized statement that this creation of “field” is necessary for writers to have and then site only one of his own five examples as actually having this fulfilled seems to me like poor data collection. This essay\chapter reads as a very sloppy throwing together of writers and interpreting what all writers are, need and want based on attributes of individuals. I am not convinced that he did enough research of a broad enough pool of diverse writers to really present readers with an idea of how “domain” functions in the literary\writers’ world.