The Joy and Terror of Artistic Inspiration
On revelation and replication
Slaughterhouse-Five was one of the seminal reading experiences of my life. I read it in 2008—consumed it, really—while living in Vietnam as an English teacher.
Every morning I went to a coffee stand near my apartment to sit on a plastic chair and read Vonnegut, the pages of the book tinged green from the awning above that filtered the blistering sun.
Written in little staccato vignettes that were funny, harrowing, and moving, and jumping back and forth through time with a healthy dose of sci-fi, Slaughterhouse-Five was unlike anything I’d ever read.
Naturally, the next time I picked up a Vonnegut novel, I hoped for a reading experience that would be completely fresh, furthering my understanding of what literature could be. And so it was with some disappointment that the next one I picked up was written in little staccato vignettes, and that it jumped back and forth through time with a healthy dose of sci-fi.
I still enjoyed it, and I still count Vonnegut as one of my favorite authors, but I’ll never forget the surprise and even sadness when it occurred to me that Slaughterhouse-Five was not a singular accomplishment but a style: it was Vonnegutian.
Consuming a new cultural experience is like discovering a new color. There is a sense of awe and wonder. First acts, or at least first encounters, are necessarily first impressions — they begin to define a new space in one’s mind, they create a new category. Which is why second acts (or second encounters) are so often disappointing, and why cultural history is littered with so many one-hit wonders.
The discovery of a new color is groundbreaking; the replication of that color, even in a slightly different shade, is imitation. It is no wonder that we even have a phrase to describe such efforts: sophomore slumps.
Replication is a perfectly understandable phenomenon; it is not hard to see why it occurs. For artists and creators, there is the obvious desire to reproduce success. An artist who has achieved wealth and fame wants to keep working and earning, to remain in the cultural conversation, to be part of the zeitgeist. But this is easier said than done.
Some creators might feel that in order to replicate their success, they must replicate the formula by which that success first came. And so a style or a voice is born, filling a niche, but the now-established style or voice may not actually improve upon the initial creative outburst. Consider the abundance of artists that enter a late period lull, churning out works that neither surprise nor flop, the formula having long ago lost the creative spark that first won people over.
This difficulty to replicate success is better understood when considering Lewis Hyde’s seminal work on the creative process, The Gift. As Hyde suggests, creativity often arises from an artist’s willingness to be open. Art doesn’t emanate from a deep creative well within—rather, it is inspired and received from without.
Hyde cites artists who describe the creative process as a moment of sudden receptivity, with the work flowing through them rather than coming from them. One such artist was Mary Shelley, who Hyde mentions wrote in her 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, “Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”
Hyde’s description sheds light on why later acts suffer. Creative outbursts are a gift (hence the title), and they cannot be fully tamed or conjured up by formulaic technique. They resist capture by gimmickry and algorithmic optimization. They arrive when the right balance of person, place, and experience combine. Explains Hyde, “Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses.”
An artist who is given the gift of creativity might find success. But there is no guarantee that, once given and then lost, the gift will return. Replication, then, becomes the easiest path to future success. When inspiration is lacking, the promise that what once worked will work again allures the artist.
Take Quentin Tarantino as an example. His recent movies, though entertaining, fail to capture the sensation that something entirely new is being experienced. After 2015’s Hateful Eight, reviewer A.O. Scott described this feeling in The New York Times: “In its blending of verbiage and violence, its deft manipulation of tension, its blurring of the line between slapstick and shock, and its intricate weave of allusions to obscure and canonical films of the past, Hateful Eight is — what’s the term I’m looking for? — a Quentin Tarantino movie.”
It’s not that Hateful Eight is a bad movie—just that its appearance in the Tarantino oeuvre happens to come after his more groundbreaking early work. But part of what made the earlier work “more groundbreaking” was that it…came earlier. Were we to borrow a trick from Vonnegut and jump back and forth through time, perhaps switching Hateful Eight with Reservoir Dogs, we might find the former to be considered the classic and the latter the imitation.
But, Vonnegut characters we are not, and so even though Reservoir Dogs seemed to define a style, Hateful Eight will always appear to be, what’s the term I’m looking for? — a Quentin Tarantino movie.
It doesn’t help that when a great work is created, it often results in a surrounding cottage industry. Tarantino has given way to generations of impersonators (just as he was inspired by the filmmakers who came before him). The result can be a kind of aesthetic fatigue. The success of one vampire novel leads to a spate of vampire novels. The success of one superhero movie leads to (seemingly endless) years of superhero movies. Other people piggyback on the success of the original, thereby dulling the overall effect. Though imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it ultimately dilutes the power of a transcendent piece of art.
There may not be a remedy for the problem of replication. Instead, we might come to recognize this feature as a natural outcome of the creative process—a kind of artistic Hegelian dialectic. A new work is like a new thesis, which is then taken up by others, played with, reinterpreted, and opposed, until ultimately this process inspires another artist to create something entirely innovative.
And a new encounter, such as my first encounter with Vonnegut, is simply a personal reorientation of that process. Perhaps all is replication. And the end of all our artistry, to repurpose T. S. Eliot, “will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
