event on a previous occasion, and that he sometimes became so heavily absorbed
when reading that if the ‘phone should ring when absorbed in a book, it feels like
getting an electric shock. I t is worse than being roused by an alarm clock after a
heavy sleep.
Q8. The response here was also significant, ... When reading ... I related to the
people in the story and care very much what happens to them. When young, I
often re-read books. I f the story had a very sad ending, I would stop my second
reading of the book before the conclusion. I t was my way of making things all
right. Of great significance was this respondent’s final comment that his former
piano teacher described composing music as the act of writing down music from her
subconscious. To her the music has existed for all time. All she had to do was to
listen carefully to her inner self and write down the notes. Maybe authors work in a
similar manner?
4.3 The Writers Responses
(a) I ntroduction
The Swiss psychoanalyst Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig suggested that creativity
happens outside the individual psyche, that a power external to the one involved in
the creative act is at work. He uses the term ‘transcendent creativity’ to describe
“... something that comes through, shines through from another world”
(Guggenbuhl-Craig, 1995:6). He further suggests that an individual possessed by
this transcendent creativity has an almost mediumistic gift of detecting what is
playing itself out and forming in the soul of the collective (1995:8).
The writers in this study confirmed this in their responses and, generally,
provided a wealth of assenting explanation, except in the case of David Malouf,
whose answers were brief but highly pertinent. I n other instances a writer has
either misunderstood a question or digressed, thus, in Chapter 5, I have
compensated for this anomaly by expanding on their responses with selections from
that particular writer’s works. This not only acts to clarify the response and provide
a more substantial engagement with the issue but such textual research
emphasizes, enhances and clarifies the thesis generally.
