Creativity, Storytelling and the Birth of Worlds
Sistine Chapel, fresco Michelangelo
There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story Margaret Atwood – MaddAddam
Creativity is defined as the ability to create something using one’s imagination or one’s original idea and is, as a concept, fairly new. The Ancient Greeks had no words or terms corresponding to the concept of creativity but rather viewed and understood art as a discovery. The notion of an original idea created out of nothingness can be traced back to the Biblical story of creation – only God could imagine a world out of nothing and he only could create such a world. Genesis begins with ‘ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς’. The word ‘ἐποίησεν’ comes from ‘poiein’ which means to make and which was for the Ancient Greeks only applied to poets (poietes) who made poetry. God is thus a poet who constructs a world full of symmetries and patterns.
Can we then imagine a world with a definite beginning? Julian in Jen Campbell’s the Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night says that ‘a beginning denotes a period in time, and, for you to pinpoint it, time must exist, and if time exists then something exists.’ There is this character, in a bedroom that might or might not exist, in a time that might or might not exist, saying that nothing is unthinkable. From the moment you think about nothing , something comes into creation.
Storytelling works in layers. A story starts in the writer’s head and it develops as it is written down. The distinction between the story and the real story is usually blurry, especially when considering point of view and voice. When a story is told in the first person it is likely that it will be biased; it will be the version of the story as seen from the perspective of a specific character. It reflects not only the character’s feelings but also his or her judgement on other characters. This is very prominent in Atwood’s MaddAddam where the main characters Jimmy, Toby, Zeb and later Blackbeard become active storytellers.