Litnet

 

Ek moet erken hierdie onderwerp fassineer my en was ek opgewonde om hierdie brief te sien ten spyte van die kommentaar wat ek apart van hierdie opdatering geplaas het. Dit is soveel meer ryker as die eindelose 'debat' oor die volkstaat. Daar is 'n kiem wat nie uit sekere Afrikaners se gestel kan kom nie. 

 

Daarom dan die volgende opstel, gedeeltes daaruit van die opstel geskryf deur Lionel Trilling en 'n poging om gedagtes oor die onderwerp te stimuleer: 

 

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent: Selected Essays of Lionel Trilling (Lionel Trilling)

Kindle Location 1688-1706  | Added on Monday, September 09, 2013, 08:10 PM

 

Art and Neurosis 1945–47 

 

The question of the mental health of the artist has engaged the attention of our culture since the beginning of the Romantic Movement. Before that time it was commonly said that the poet was “mad,” but this was only a manner of speaking, a way of saying that the mind of the poet worked in different fashion from the mind of the philosopher; it had no real reference to the mental hygiene of the man who was the poet. But in the early nineteenth century, with the development of a more elaborate psychology and a stricter and more literal view of mental and emotional normality, the statement was more strictly and literally intended. So much so, indeed, that Charles Lamb, who knew something about madness at close quarters and a great deal about art, undertook to refute in his brilliant essay “On the Sanity of True Genius,” the idea that the exercise of the imagination was a kind of insanity. And some eighty years later, the idea having yet further entrenched itself, Bernard Shaw felt called upon to argue the sanity of art, but his cogency was of no more avail than Lamb’s. In recent years the connection between art and mental illness has been formulated not only by those who are openly or covertly hostile to art, but also and more significantly by those who are most intensely partisan to it. The latter willingly and even eagerly accept the idea that the artist is mentally ill and go on to make his illness a condition of his power to tell the truth. This conception of artistic genius is indeed one of the characteristic notions of our culture. I should like to bring it into question. To do so is to bring also into question certain early ideas of Freud’s and certain conclusions which literary laymen have drawn from the whole tendency of the Freudian psychology. From the very start it was recognized that psychoanalysis was likely to have important things to say about art and artists. Freud himself thought so, yet when he first addressed himself to the subject he said many clumsy and misleading things. I have elsewhere and at length tried to separate the useful from the useless and even dangerous statements about art that Freud has made.1 To put it briefly here, Freud had some illuminating and even beautiful insights into certain particular works of art which made complex use of the element of myth.

 

Some of the “blame” must rest with the poets themselves. The Romantic poets were as proud of their art as the vaunting poets of the sixteenth century, but one of them talked with an angel in a tree and insisted that Hell was better than Heaven and sexuality holier than chastity; another told the world that he wanted to Me down like a tired child and weep away this life of care; another asked so foolish a question as “Why did I laugh tonight?”; and yet another explained that he had written one of his best poems in a drugged sleep. The public took them all at their word—they were not as other men. Zola, in the interests of science, submitted himself to examination by fifteen psychiatrists and agreed with their conclusion that his genius had its source in the neurotic elements of his temperament. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine found virtue and strength in their physical and mental illness and pain. W. H. Auden addresses his “wound” in the cherishing language of a lover, thanking it for the gift of insight it has bestowed. “Knowing you,” he says, “has made me understand.” And Edmund Wilson, in his striking phrase “the wound and the bow,” has formulated for our time the idea of the characteristic sickness of the artist, which he represents by the figure of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior who was forced to live in isolation because of the disgusting odor of a suppurating wound and who yet had to be sought out by his countrymen because they had need of the magically unerring bow he possessed. The myth of the sick artist, we may suppose, has established itself because it is of advantage to the various groups who have one or another relation with art. To the artist himself the myth gives some of the ancient powers and privileges of the idiot and the fool, half-prophetic creatures, or of the mutilated priest. That the artist’s neurosis may be but a mask is suggested by Thomas Mann’s pleasure in representing his untried youth as “sick” but his successful maturity as senatorially robust. By means of his belief in his own sickness, the artist may the more easily fulfill his chosen, and assigned, function of putting himself into connection with the forces of spirituality and morality; the artist sees as insane the “normal” and “healthy” ways of established society, while aberration and illness appear as spiritual and moral health if only because they controvert the ways of respectable society. Then too, the myth has its advantage for the philistine—a double advantage. On the one hand, the belief in the artist’s neuroticism allows the philistine to shut his ears to what the artist says. But on the other hand it allows him to listen. For we must not make the common mistake—the contemporary philistine does want to listen, at the same time that he wants to shut his ears.

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