Table Of ContentTHE ACT OF CREATION
by
Arthur Koestler
PENGUIN
ARKANA
The Act of Creation
Arthur Koestler alternated all his life between the man of action and the man of letters. Born in Budapest in 1905, he studied at Vienna University before becoming a journalist. As a foreign correspondent he travelled widely, visiting the Middle East, Paris and Moscow. In 1937, while representing the "News Chronicle" in Spain, he was captured by Franco's troops and imprisoned under sentence of death. He was eventually released on the intervention of the British Government and returned to London. During the war he served with the French Foreign Legion and the British Army and in 1945 became Special Correspondent for The Times in Palestine. In the 1940s and early 1950s he was perhaps the most widely read political novelist of our time. Darkness at Noon, considered to be his masterpiece, was published in 1940, followed by Arrival and Departure (1943), Thieves in the Night (1946), The Age of Longing (1951) and The Call Girls (1972). From 1956 he became immersed in questions of science and mysticism, and had a huge following among young people. Explaining his varied interests, Koestler wrote: 'Out of my quarrels with the human condition I made my novels; the other books are attempts to analyse that same condition in scientific terms. In my more optimistic moments it seems to me that the two add up to a whole. At any rate, without both media I would feel only half alive.' The Act of Creation (1964) is the second book in his classic trilogy on the mind of man, which began with The Sleepwalkers (1959) and ended with The Ghost in the Machine (1967). Among his other books are The Yogi and the Commissar (1945), The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971) and Bricks to Babel, a collection of non-fiction essays.
Koestler received the Sonning Prize from the University of Copenhagen in 1968 and was awarded a number of honorary doctorates. He was a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was made a CBE in 1972 and a Companion of Literature in 1974, and on three occasions was nominated for the Nobel Prize. Arthur Koestler died in 1983. The Times obituary called him 'a consistently lucid and humane writer . . . His reputation as one of the most versatile and protean writers of our century is thoroughly deserved.'
ARTHUR KOESTLER
The Act of Creation
ARKANA
PENGUIN BOOKS
ARKANA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Private Bag 102902, NSMC, Aukland, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published by Hutchinson & Co. 1964
Published by Arkana 1989
Copyright © Arthur Koestler, 1964
All rights reserved
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
THE ART OF DISCOVERY
AND THE DISCOVERIES OF ART
*
PART ONE
THE JESTER
I THE LOGIC OF LAUGHTER 27
The Triptych -- The Laughter Reflex -- The Paradox of Laughter --
The Logic of Laughter: A First Approach --
Matrices and Codes -- Hidden Persuaders --
Habit and Originality -- Man and Machine
II LAUGHTER AND EMOTION 51
Aggression and Identification -- The Inertia of Emotion --
The Mechanism of Laughter -- The Importance of not being Earnest
III VARIETIES OF HUMOUR 64
Pun and Witticism -- Man and Animal -- Impersonation --
The Child-Adult -- The Trivial and the Exalted --
Caricature and Satire -- The Misfit --
The Paradox of the Centipede -- Displacement --
Coincidence -- Nonsense -- Tickling -- The Clown --
Originality, Emphasis, Economy
IV FROM HUMOUR TO DISCOVERY 87
Explosion and Catharsis -- 'Seeing the Joke' and 'Solving the Problem -- The Creation of Humour -- Paradox and Synthesis -- Summary
