The sensation of novelty largely depends on the breadth of vision and the depth of memory. That which seems new for a young girl may not be such for an old man. The depth of memory in covering the news on TV or newspapers rarely exceeds a few months. In what they sell as 'new, ' 'original' and 'unprecedented, ' a historian, philologist or psychologist may easily find recurrent patterns that were in use many ages ago. When Mikhail L. Gasparov, a Russian classic philologist, translator and researcher in verse prosody, was once asked by a journalist about his attitude to Stalinist repressions, he began his answer as follows: "We who went through the Peloponnesian wars..." This was not pretentiousness or extravagance but rather an effect of different depth of the historic memory, which make the deeds of ancient time as much more vivid and significant as the events of the recent past. When Arieti (1976) criticizes Jung saying that his analysis of archetypes reminds him of archaeological excavations and fails to explain the quality of novelty of the creative work, he misses the point by someway. The new and the old are not two completely different entities but rather the two sides of a coin. The new is always based on what was before and the one appears through another like the water under the ice for those who can see. Was, then, Ecclesiastes right, and the new is only a by-product of oblivion and ignorance?
Self-aware artists, writers, scientists and other creators and innovators have always acknowledged the relativity of novelty. Newton acknowledged standing "on the shoulders of giants" in science. Goethe who was both a poet and a scientist asked the question, "What is invention, and who can say that he invented something?" and answered himself, "It is an utter foolishness to swagger about precedence. Not to admit oneself, after all, a plagiarist is just a senseless fanfaronade". The historian Thomas Carlyle maintained that "the merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity." Mandelstam writing about a skald, who "will compose again somebody else's song and will utter it as its own" described how poetry is created. T.S. Eliot said that the difference between a good poet and a bad one is that the first steals consciously while the second steals unconsciously. And a contemporary inventor holds that the main thing that one should have to invent is a big database.
However, if even one accepts the fact of borrowing ideas and material in creativity, one usually can distinguish - intuitively or rationally - new from old, original from banal. What is then the nature of perceived novelty? Arieti (1996: 4) points out, "Whereas theologians and religious people in general believe that God's creation comes ex nihilo, from special and temporal nothingness, human creativity uses what is already existing and available and changes it in unpredictable ways". These 'unpredictable ways' may include: the creation of forms that are not in use in the creator's environment, the combination of the common elements into a singular structure, the deformation of the habitual form, a shift of function in which the object is used and so forth. Thus, taxonomy of novelty turns into taxonomy of transformations.
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