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In ‘The raison d’ětre of criticism in the arts', E. M. Forster differentiates between the critical and the creative states of mind by associating the creative state with the unconscious and the critical state with the conscious mind. Forster describes the creative state as being ‘akin to a dream’:
In it a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach. He mixes this thing with his normal experiences, and out of the mixture he makes a work of art…. Such seems to be the creative process. It may employ much technical ingenuity and worldly knowledge, it may profit by critical standards, but mixed up with it is this stuff from the bucket, this subconscious stuff, which is not procurable on demand (FORSTER 7).
In his description of the creative state, Forster emphasises ‘the connection between the subconscious and the conscious, which has to be effected before the work of art can be born’. He does not think that such a connection is essential to the critical state of mind: ‘It does not let down buckets into the subconscious. It does not conceive in sleep’ (Ibid. 7). Therefore, according to Forster, the creative process, unlike the critical process, involves the transformation of the artist. He temporarily loses his self-consciousness and attains a type of mystical union with his transpersonal self.
Forster expounds on the artist's union with the other, or transpersonal, self in Anonymity: an enquiry. Here Forster describes the universal and transcendent condition towards which all literature proceeds:
Each human mind has two personalities, one on the surface, one deeper down. The upper personality has a name. It is called S. T. Coleridge, or William Shakespeare, or Mrs. Humphry Ward. It is conscious and alert, it does things like dining out, answering letters, etc., and it differs vividly and amusingly from other personalities. The lower personality is a very queer affair. In many