Art and Artist  

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Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (1932, German: Kunst und Künstler) is a book by psychologist Otto Rank, a disciple of Sigmund Freud.

In it, he chose a substantial excerpt from Pico della Mirandola's Speech on the Dignity of Man as the motto, including: "...I created thee as a being neither celestial nor earthly... so that thou shouldst be thy own free moulder and overcomer...".

Full text of the English translation

“If, on my returning after more than twenty-five years to my original artist-problem, I am able to put forward my conception of artistic creativity in a comprehensive form, I owe it not merely to the course of my own development, but also to the advances that have been made in the most varied departments of knowledge. For it was precisely in the period following the turn of the century, during which I struggled through to my own world-outlook, that the branches of knowledge bearing particularly on the study of art made such enormous progress as to necessitate a re-orientation of the whole art problem. But without the asset of the experience I had gained in winning through to an independent outlook, I should, as a layman in the domain of art, hardly have been entitled to compete with the array of prominent specialists (above all, German) who, during that period, raised modern art-history to a level never before thought of. To me, however, the whole science of art seems to be permeated, as I have said before, with a far-reaching dualism. which not only comes out in differences of opinion among different scholars and the divergences of their schools, but reflects the dualism inherent in the problem of art itself. Now, my view of psychological problems included from the first the knowledge and acknowledgment of a dualism inherent in the individual and not dependent on any external opposition for its existence. It seems to me, therefore, that my whole conception of man should not only lead to a better understanding of the dualist nature of art, but also, to a great extent, help to overcome the contradictions arising from that dualism in the history of art-criticism. “The comparative method of treatment, which we have to use in studying the genesis of the creative impulse, may at the same time be used to clear up satisfactorily a number of contradictions, not intrinsically part of the problem of art itself, but brought into it from neighbouring spheres, and in the course of applying these to the understanding of art. If we reject those methods of psychological investigation which, from time immemorial, have assumed two types of artist and played off the one against the other, we are left with three important provinces of knowledge, all of which have disappointed expectations as to the value of their specialized advances to the science of art. These provinces are: cultural history, which, since the turn of the century, has opened up practically a new world of prehistory through archaæology; then, in its wake, the study of race and the migration of peoples, the ethnological problems of which have been revived as determining the rise, decline, and supersession of the cultures; and, lastly, the history v of style, the revision of which had become imperative since the materialistic conception of art that prevailed in the nineteenth century, culminating in Semper’s “Styl.” In this last branch, thanks to Riegl, there was definitive progress in the attitude towards, and understanding of, art. But, considering the recent date of all these scientific achievements, we need not wonder that the historical treatment of the positively overwhelming mass of cultural and ethnological material provided by arch ology in recent decades has not yet arrived at a uniform interpretation. Too much preliminary work had to be done by the specialized experts before they could arrive at any but provisional conclusions as to the significance of their excavations and discoveries. “Casual and most incomplete as are the data provided by the archeologists’ recent discovery of prehistoric art when we try to survey them, in conjunction with the contemporary work of ethnologists on the practice of art by primitive peoples, we see not only that an immense amount of work has been achieved in a comparatively short time, but also that unsuspected problems have come up along with these results.1 Conze, indeed, had dealt with prehistory as early as 1871, but when we remember that it was not until 1879 that the Spaniard de Santuola published his first report on the European cave-paintings of the ice age, we realize the scope of the task which prehistoric research has set the men of our own time. Moreover, if we consider that the authenticity of this earliest report of the incredible artistic skill of paleolithic man was at first disputed, and that it took the discovery of the cave at La Mouthe, in the south of France, to convince the prehistorians and lead them to continue their researches, we shall realize bow young our knowledge of this hitherto unsuspected art-world is. It was much the same with the art of the primitives: this was really only included officially in the general scheme of arthistory in 1900, with K. Woermann’s Geschichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und V¨olker, after Ernst Grosse had written the first comprehensive study of it in 1894.2 Even the preliminary monographs by Hildebrand (Eskimo, 1885), Hain (Dyaks, 1890), Stolpe (Hervey Islanders, 1892), von den Steinen (Brazilians, 1894) Schurz (Indians, 1895), and Frobenius (Africans 1895) appeared only just before the turn of the century, although there have been innumerable publications since. The same applies to the archa:ological discoveries in the prehistory of civilized races. Take, for instance, Schliemann’s excavations in Mycenæin 1874, which were only brought to a successful conclusion after the turn of the century, by Dorpfeld at Troy. It was only in 1895 that Sir Flinders Petrie started on the excavations in Egypt which gave an entirely new picture of its early times; it is the same with Crete, the quite recent archeological exploitation of which by Sir Arthur Evans is of incalculable significance for the history of art. (Excavation was begun there in 1899.)3 Equally recent is the information that we have obtained about America’s pre-Columbian art and particularly the magnificent Mayan monuments in the south. Once the late palæolithic wall-paintings of Spain had been discovered, in 1908, an incredibly large number of them were found in succession. The very similar cave-paintings of the South Africans, commonly called “Bushman art,” have, again, only been revealed to us in the present century by the untiring research of Frobenius. “As we shall frequently have occasion to refer to the contributions made to arthistory by these various discoveries and the research connected with them, in which 1While reading the proofs, I came across a very helpful survey of archeological discoveries in the twentieth century by Friedrich von OppeinBronikowski: Archæologische Entdeckungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1931). 2 It is hardly necessary co refer to the very cursory treatment of primitive art, written under the influence of Romanticism, by Franz Kugler in the first history of art (1842). 3The third and last volume of Evans’s great work on Crete appeared while the present book was being written, in the winter of 1930. vi leading prehistorians—H¨ornes, Obermaier, Hauser, Klaatsch, and others—have also taken part, we turn for the moment,in this general survey, to the cultural-historical and ethnological problems on which some new light has been thrown by these glimpses into prehistory. ln particular, prehistoric Europe has been elevated from its role of Cinderella by the abundant stone-age discoveries that have been made within its limits. For Europe has long been overshadowed by the ancient high cultures of the East, from which all the light which illuminated our old continent was supposed to come. And although, in the first joy of rediscovery, the new princess may have been acclaimed to excess, the fact remains that now any intelligent history of Europe that is not a mere relic of the school-books must be begun long before the great Migrations. So that, even after discounting the unnatural, but rather too subjective, nationalist enthusiasms of certain Germanic researchers for the newly discovered prehistory of Europe, we still have enough sure material to account for a Northern cultural circle with potentialities of influence similar to those of the better-known cultures of the South and particularly the East. As we shall have to deal with various special investigations of this description (such as Krause’s Trojaburgen, 1893; Muchau’s Pfahlhausbau, 1909; Scheltema’s Altnordische Kunst, 1923) more thoroughly later, we will here refer to one only: namely, Carl Schuchhardt’s Alteuropa—not only a basic work, but one of particular value for the cultural-historical aspect of art, in that it has kept fairly dear of the pitfall of national bias. The first edition (1918) bears the sub-title: “in its cultural and stylistic development”; the second edition, considerably altered and enlarged, appeared as: A Prehistory of our Continent (Eine Vorgeschichte unseres Erdteils ; Berlin, 1926). The fact that Schuchhardt’s conception of art is still the purely technical-mechanical Semperism of last century does not lessen the value of his observations on cultural- and folk-history, for there is only one of his opinions which essentially need concern us here: namely that, even in prehistoric times, he finds definite evidence of the same contrast between North and South which is found in the historical periods of artistic development, as, for instance, in the struggle between Gothic and Renaissance. And this dualism is not limited to Europe, at any rate as the term is understood in our present historical geography. Southern France, for instance, shows a stone age similar to that of North America, and, in the East, the radiation from the Southern cultural zone of the Mediterranean races did not stop short at the borders of Asia. If, for a start, we admit the distinctiveness and independence of the three culture-zones—Northern, South-western, and Eastern—as they are indicated by nature and established by archæological discoveries, we get a new picture of cultural development which will be full of significance for the understanding of the forms and styles of art as well. “These three great culture-zones, differentiated even in prehistoric times, were bound, sooner or later, to meet in the Mediterranean and create a mixed culture, which in its turn was quite distinctive and, as is not surprising, brought forth a human type of many and varied talents. The culture which we have recently come to know as the Cretan-Mycenæan leaves us in no doubt that historic Greece also was a result of these cultural mixings in “the Balkans,” although at the same time we see something greater, too—the birth of a new and more harmonious type of human being which was at once the end-product and the conqueror of the old. Whether the now undeniable existence of Northern influence side by side with that of the South-west and the East is a justification of the theory of an Indo-Germanic penetration of Hellas is of little importance, compared with the fact that the influences of Northern and South-western cultural elements are now taking their rightful place along with those of the once unchallengeable East. All the same, it would be premature to throw the old formula Ex vii oriente lux overboard without more ado; rather does it seem that a new meaning can be given to it if we limit its application to a particular world-outlook which with good reason we may call the pre-scientific. For that which has undeniably enlightened our culture from the East is the intellectual penetration of phenomena with the tendency to bring them into a system, whether it be of a mythological, religious, or philosophical nature. In other words, it is intellectualism that we have taken from the East, while the North shows the opposite tendency towards the mystic, the nebulous, and the spiritual as against the intellectual. The South, again, shows a pretty definite leaning towards naturalism, which is alien to both the other cultures, in its direct association with nature; nay, more in the oneness of its human type with nature, which climatic reasons, not to mention others, cause the Northerner to reject, while the East is antipathetic to nature precisely on account of its hyper-intellectuality. Be this as it may, there is one point on which almost all our scholars, writers of cultural history, and art-critics are agreed: that the North has produced an abstract, geometrical style of art, whereas the peculiar characteristic of the Southern style is naturalism. Only the East has proved difficult to “place”; for, from having been over-estimated as the prime source of all human culture, it is now denied any influence whatever. And so it comes about that we have Pan-Babylonians and Pan-Germanics opposing each other, each school trying to prove the superiority or independence of its own culture instead of taking trouble to analyse its specific characteristics. We shall presently be able to demonstrate, in connexion with a particular problem, not only how each of the three cultural zones excelled in the production of different art-forms, but how even today an intelligent comparison of the respective cultural materials may throw light on one and the same problem from different sides. For instance, in accounting for the widespread spiral ornament, we shall find the most and the best historical data in the North, while the South will contribute the nature myths necessary to its interpretation, and the East an explanation of it which borders on the scientific. While art- and culture-history are, quite rightly, interested in the succession in time of the phenomena and the different influences under which they come into being, we, on the other hand, regard it as our task to establish, not the spatial “whence” or the temporal “since when,” but the spiritual why. This does not imply any intention of denying the effect of culture-drift or the importance of historical sequence; we merely think that the problem as to how the phenomenon in question arose at all—no matter when and where—is entitled to be considered at least as worthy of an attempt at solution. “We have discussed the cultural-historical aspects of the art problem somewhat in detail here, because by implication they contain the style-problems within themselves. For if we identify the North with abstract and the South with naturalistic art, we present at the same time the psychological characterization of a corresponding human type who will produce just this kind of style. It is true that “North” and “South” are terms essentially referring to climate and the economic conditions dependent on climate; but these things do, after all, contribute definitely to the production of the human type concerned. And we must not forget that man is not only a product of his natural environment, since the essence of every culture is determined by the greater or less degree of its domination of nature and independence of her influences. In looking at art from the ethnological or economic standpoint, we are apt to overlook the fact that art is produced by man and not by Nature, although it is Nature that helps to form and educate man. Here, again, the artist with his creative personality is almost eliminated, as he is from the spiritual and scientific history of art and the æsthetic which borders on psychology. Not only does this apply to the prehistoric age, for which no report viii on the individual man can reach us; it applies also to the artistic development which works itself out in the full light of history. When writers on art speak of a Gothic artist or an Impressionist, they refer of course to the laws of style revealed in his work. But the individual artist who employs this style as a form of expression is something more than a mere representative of this tendency; and one often wonders what psychological significance such an æesthetic classification really has. To put it in another way, does the Gothic artist stand for a particular type of man? And, supposing that he has found his expression in the North, what is his spiritual structure, and can it perhaps take root elsewhere than in Northern mother earth—as was the case, we take it, with Michelangelo? And will not a strong personality, like Michelangelo in the South, or Goethe in the North, be inclined in any case to take over the given art-forms, indeed, and even to develop them, but also to break through, to overcome, these forms, to mix them with others, to supplant them by others? “The fact that this not only is possible, but does actually occur in the case of almost every great artist-personality, brings us back to our spiritual dualism and to the experience that at any rate the two tendencies—call them what one will—must be potentially present in the artist, even though both do not always find expression. In mentioning the following treatises on the derivation of the creative impulse from this conflicting dualism, I would remind my readers that even cool-eyed art-historians are forced in the end to some such conception of the transmutation of the laws of style. Two important critical studies on art which appeared in the same year (1923) arrive from totally different starting-points at the one conclusion: that the two opposing tendencies of style (which Scheltema in Altnordische Kunst calls “mechanical” and “organic,” and Herbert K¨uhn in Kunst der Primitiven “imaginative” and “sensory”) coexist side by side and even develop one out of the other. K¨uhn starts from economic factors— wherein he had been anticipated by Grosse and to some extent H¨ornes—and connects naturalistic art with the nomadic hunter’s existence, and the abstract art-form with that of the farmers and cattle-breeders who have settled on the soil. These simple parallels between economic forms and art-forms, which have been extended by others to the family organization (matriarchal—naturalistic; patriarchal—abstract), are applied by K¨uhn to a psychological opposition of consumption and production on the basis of the Marxian theory. He sees the hunter as leading an existence which mainly absorbs from outside and having in consequence a naturalistic conception of art-forms; whereas agrarian culture is one of fruitfulness in creative art as in other respects. K¨uhn does not, indeed, as we have seen, accept any opposition of principle between the two tendencies, but deduces the one by a dialectical process from the other. But in one culture-zone it will be a development from the sensory to the imaginative, as in the South Seas or in Africa, where the natural model becomes geometricized; and another time—say, in the North—it will be the other way round, a development from the geometric style to the organic. “A similar process of development is recognized by Scheltema in his deep and subtle analysis of the style of specifically Northern art-forms. These he does not derive from economic forms, like K¨uhn, or technical-practical motives, like Schuchhardt, but accounts for on a principle of spiritual development. While Scheltema who has confined his special research to a strictly limited and definite field, sees the same development from abstract to organic repeated in every single phase of development of Northern art, from the stone age to the bronze and iron ages, K¨uhn, with a wider scope, has managed to establish the recurrence of one law of development at different times and different places almost throughout the history of art. Thus in Crete a peak period ,of imaginaix tive art was followed by frank sensorialism. “Altered in form, and yet quite similar, was the change which took place under the same laws, thousands of years afterwards, in America among the Aztecs and Incas, and again, centuries later, in Africa among the conquering races of Benin and Yoruba. In all these cultures the way leads unmistakably from imaginative to sensorial art, from collectivism to individualism, from the dualist outlook to the unitary, and from the strongly religious world to the practical everyday society.”4 The only exception to this rule that development leads from abstract to concrete appears to occur in the case of palæolithic man’s naturalistic art. Scheltema excludes this art from his survey on the ground that no further artistic development from it is possible, and that the abstract art-form of the neolithic age is primary and intrinsic in the North. But I do not think the question can be disposed of so simply. For one thing, we cannot divide off the Northern neolithic so sharply from the Southern, for all their differences; and, for another, it remains doubtful whether the naturalism of the glacial age really represents the beginning of all artistic activity, whether, in fact, there are not more abstract art-forms, completely lost to us, which preceded it. It is risky to reconstruct the mentality of these people on no other evidences than the artistic remains of the glacial age which have been accidentally preserved. But it is nevertheless noteworthy that the sole explanation of the appearance of such highly developed drawing and pictorial art as this palæolithic has handed down to us comes from a physiologist, Max Verworn. In his book: Zur Psychologie der primitiven Kunst (1908) the scholar declares this art to be a “physioplastic” reproduction of nature which, in contrast to the later “ideoplastic” treatment, has a certain spontaneity, instinctiveness, and nonreflectiveness. It does not seem to me that this view does much more than give us a terminology that strikingly expresses the dualism which lies at the base of all artistic production, although it does at least imply an attempt at evaluation instead of a mere description. For even if we accept Verworn’s terminology, we are still obliged to assume that glacial man, although in the main physioplastic in his rendering, must also have had ideoplastic possibilities of no rudimentary order; otherwise he would not have been in a position to produce a work of art intuitively. All art, whether primarily naturalistic or primarily abstract, unites both elements within itself, and indeed itself arises (as we shall see) from a conflict between the two tendencies, of which first one, then the other, gains the upper hand. The decision does not, however, depend only on the culture and its economic environment, but equally upon the creative individual, in whom the same dualistic conflict exists, whether, as at a primitive stage, between life and death, or, at a later one, between body and soul, matter and spirit, individual and society. “Leaving aside, therefore, for the moment all attempts such as those above mentioned to assign values to the style-contrasts, and looking at the problem from its psychological aspect, we may say (following up an idea of K¨uhn’s) that naturalistic art has always flourished where and when individualism was the order of the day or had obtained the mastery. This was not the case only in definite master-cultures with whose structure we are familiar, such as Crete, Mycenæ:, Classical Greece, and the Renaissance; it applies also to primitive man- at least in the wider sense of the term. For even if this primitive man was no individualist in the sense in which those masterful natures were so—or even in the sense of our decadent psychologism—he was a lordly person relying upon his own strength before he became sedentary and united to collective bodies of men through agriculture. In any case, abstract art, in contrast to sensory or organic art, is usually collective, as is demonstrated by Northern and also primitive ornamen4Herbert K¨uhn: Kunst der Primitiven, p. 120 x tation as well as by religious Gothic. In these facts a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psychologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the understanding of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity. The autonomous individualism of primitive man, as well as that of the lordly masters appears to be more dependent on Nature in its artistic creativeness than is the sedentary collective type of man, who, though depending to a great extent on nature’s moods and his own environment (of commerce), can yet rise to abstractions in art which are quite independent of reality. We shall see presently how this compensatory function of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison. Here I would merely point out- in pursuance of an idea already put forward- that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess the tendency to reproduce something absent, which in certain cases happens to be a natural object, while in others it pictures an idea. The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination, whether this takes the form of a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell or of the symbolic representation of a human abstraction. Behind both there is the creative will of the personality, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form—here one agrees with Scheltema—is more capable of development, not only for stylistic and æsthetic, but for psychological reasons as well. For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a given cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them otherwise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. In a word, art consists in the latter case of arbitrary re-creation (not copying) of the given objects; in the other, of the new creation of ever changing ideas. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.” xi xii Essays on Art and Artist Doug Mounce May 7, 2014 2 Contents 1 Creative Urge and Personality Development 5 2 Life and Creation 9 3 Art-Form and Ideology 13 4 The Play-Impulse and Æsthetic Pleasure 17 5 Microcosm and Macrocosm 21 5.1 Micro and Macro I . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 5.2 Micro and Macro II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 6 House Building and Architecture 37 7 Myth and Metaphor 49 8 Speech Formation and Creation 57 9 The Poetic Art and Its Hero 65 10 Game and Destiny 73 11 Beauty and Truth 79 12 The Artist’s Fight with Art 93 13 Success and Fame 101 14 Deprivation and Renunciation 109 3 4 Chapter 1 Creative Urge and Personality Development Socrates appears before us as one of those great plastic figures, all of a piece, such as we are accustomed to see at his period—a complete, classical work of art, which has risen of itself to that height. These figures are not made; they form themselves completely into what they are; they become that which they will to be, and to that they remain true. Thus Socrates, by his art and power of conscious will, formed himself for his own character and his life’s task. Hegel Here are a few thoughts on Otto Rank’s Art and Artist. The first chapter, on Creative Urge and Personality Development, is the kicker to the book’s title. Two themes are developed on the work of art historians Alois Reigl and Wilhelm Worrington who helped Rank with ideas about a will-to-form and the forming of a will. Artists in all eras are inspired individuals in a social context with an interest to eternalize their personality, and their will develops in the act of imprinting this interest on concrete materials which drives the early movement from abstraction to humanization. The basic thesis is that development in the meaning of art forms parallels development in soul belief. Rank’s contribution is investigating the relation between an individual and the society in terms of a productive personality that develops in a collective ideology, but he also uses the artist manqu´e to illustrate the same relation in negative terms from his unique understanding of the neurotic personality. In any case, Reigl provides the insight that art is a will-to-form, and Worringer extends the logic right-up-to the psychological insight of a cosmic urge. Rank views the art form 5 in terms of soul belief. Testing this idea with primitive art, for example, he finds that abstract ornamentation accurately reflects an individual’s experience of that culture’s mostly unreal world. Our modern world, in contrast, emphasizes the real as rational, and that reality is sometimes incorrectly projected onto primitive art with the interpretation that abstract features are due to a lack of ability in duplicating the“natural” world. Oriental religious patterns and designs, likewise, convey a sense of universal wonder and order which the individual accurately understands in their representation, and, what is more, is a concrete presentation of the individual artist’s sophisticated working-out of the collective soul belief. Society structures all individual effort in this dualism that exists when an individual expresses their personal immortality interest within the collective ideology. Worringer identifies how basic forms recommend themselves to the artist in the social context by the very structure of the material (crystal lattices, for example), and Reigl provides the foundation that art must be understood in terms of historical context. The decisive point of contact is with the,“individual urge to eternalization of the personality, which motivates artistic production, to be a principle inherent in the art-form itself, in fact its essence.” “Here we may state, more definitely than we have as yet, that the main task of this book is to expound the development and change in meaning of art-forms from similar changes in the idea of the soul, which decides the development of personality, even as it is itself influenced thereby.” The dynamic of an individual in the society is understood through art as ideas about the soul, and these ideas influence the artist as well as social beliefs. Important beliefs require important forms, and the artist uniquely makes the soul idea concrete; this is both a will to form by the individual as well as a social demonstration proving the soul’s existence as indestructible. “It is therefore not a defective faculty of abstraction which drives to the concretization of the soul and its pictorial representation in the god, but the will to objectify it and thus to impart to it existence and, what is more, eternity.” Why does the artist have this unique interest in concretization of the soul? That is a tough question which Rank addresses by the general conclusion that you can’t predict who will create this need in themselves to individually produce the object of art about a collective belief. In any case, it happens, and there are reasons discussed later about the“success” of such endeavors. For now, we simply find it reasonable that Oriental ornamentation and primitive abstractions are sophisticated representations of an early grasp on the idea of soul belief. Society says there is a soul, and the artist tries to make that abstract concept concrete. Rank suggests that the act of impressing this idea onto materials contributes to the movement from a primitive abstract belief to a classical naturalism. This movement culminates in the Greek ideal of beauty, for example, as a humanization of the soul belief in the god, and then in the god who is man. “. . . not only did the development of the soul begin with art, but the process of the humanization of the soul completed itself in art and not religion.” Even the Greek marble, Rank says, literally reflects both the durability and beauty of this idea. We obviously are dealing with extended ranges of time including many transitions and categories, and Rank will of course not reduce the productive personality to a simple biological psychology or collective consciousness. This book is his own work of art, and he begins by testing his understanding and extension of Reigl and Worringer’s ideas that the individual will to form 6 and the cosmic urge to create can be found in the relation of an individual to the society in terms of soul belief. “. . . which is certainly no imitation of nature, but rather an organic vitalization of fossilizing art forms.” Rank will show later how a strong ideology actually encourages this individual expression. “Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual.” And so we move from the artistically presented ornamental and abstract primitive art, to the sociologically organized classical understanding of an individual soul in the society, and conclude with our modern psychologically developed individual. Throughout the ages, artists develop their own personality in terms of a creative urge within society. “. . . creativity begins with the individual himself—that is, with the self-making of the personality into the artist.” Forming of the art (the artist literally forms), “. . . impresses and enforces a dominant form on the natural material of bone, flesh and blood as an assertion of its own independence; . . . a truly new creation.” It doesn’t stretch the imagination to think of an artist creating vital ornaments in a primitive society, or that classical art naturally is full of forms glorifying the individual human being in social icons. The dualism that Rank addresses in this chapter, however, deepens our understanding of how society, recognizing individual achievement, and encouraging it within the collective religion, combines with the productive individual in a way that ultimately creates a personality cult of genius. Now, there have been geniuses in every age, so why, where and how do we get particular attention focused on, and individuals declared as,“genius” in the classical period? Belief in genius is, at least, important for the individual artist and the society that glorifies the work. All artists are capable of producing new creations, but the genius uniquely struggles under a dualism of individual sacrifice and collective belonging. Michelangelo is a tortured soul, but Shakespeare also has an interest in economic security. More on this later; this chapter concludes on how the genius personality cult relates to a modern, individual psychology in the art of expressionism. One of the joys of reading a great thinker from the past is the curious anachronisms. Rank gets the word “expressionism” from Worringer, who coined it, and I found it humorous how he tentatively uses the word and suggests that, yes, it seems like a pretty-good description of the art form and personalities of his day, both in terms of the abstract style and individual psychology. In any case, a new dualism arises because a modern artist can choose classical forms for this individual expression, or the focus of the artistic endeavor may centrally develop on the artist’s own personality. This is where Rank naturally finds many examples, and the conclusion of the chapter focuses on this personality development as a prelude to further discussion. The Bohemian wears a certain style cap, for example, and associates with a certain group, who drink a certain drink, and gather in particular places, all-of-which marks them as both different from society and belonging to a collective group. This happens in other professions, of course, like doctors or bankers, but we will see the important relation to art as the creative urge and personality development is explored further. 7 Figure 1.1: From K. von den Steinen: Die Marquesaner und Ihre Kunst (Berlin, 1931) The development of art forms can be understood in terms of development in soul belief. The primitive abstraction leads to a classical intuition and culminates with individual expressionism. Art is the personal consciousness moved to create, and the artist develops their personality in a collective ideology by creating vital forms that are a new creation. An individual urge to eternalization goes hand-in-hand with the art form, and the collective ideology that both inspires and appreciates the art object. In our age, the art form itself can be the artist’s personality. 8 Chapter 2 Life and Creation What would live in song immortally Must in life first perish . . . Schiller What does it mean to self-form? Rank expands on how art forms can be understood in terms of soul belief by investigating Life and Creation. Life is creatively tied to work, and Rank compares the uniquely creative artist with the uniquely restricted neurotic as non-average individuals. These are individuals who either trade life for work to make a new creation, or who charily dole out life in restricted production; both responding in context of the ideological society and biological impulse. When deliberately appropriating life experience in a more-and-more personal creation, the self-forming genius also requires more-and-more personal justification, to the point of a particular, idealized other, to both promote and justify what ultimately will be destroyed. “. . . the act which we have described as the artist’s self-appointment as such is in itself a spontaneous expression of the creative impulse, of which the first manifestation is simply the forming of the personality itself, . . . but this alone does not suffice to make an artist or a genius. It is, however, indispensable.” In the case of great artists the process is reflected in the fact that they had either a principle or a favorite work, at which they labored all their lives (Goethe’s Faust, Rodin’s Porte de l’Enfer, Michelangelo’s Tomb of Julius, and so on), or a favorite theme which they never relinquished and which came to be a distinct representation of themselves (as, for example, Rembrandt’s self portraits). The biological impulse and inhibition must be understood with the personal will which the artist productively uses and the neurotic fearfully and willfully suppresses. Both are examples of a non-average individual, whose ego, Rank says, is inclined to interpret the difference as inferiority unless it can be proved by achievement to be superiority. “This romantic dualism of life and creation, which corresponds to our psychological dualism of impulse and will, is, in the last resort, the conflict between individual and collective immortality, in which we have all suffered so acutely since the decay of religion and the decline of art.” 9 Nietzsche is the classic romantic doomed to fail; the decadent artist demonstrating a new development in personality with the impossible goal of self-perpetuation. He represents an individual psychology that began with the artist laboring under a collective religious belief where the art was a social object abstract in its relation to the artist except as obvious demonstration of a material formation, and moved to the individualized and idealized belief of the god in man himself with its idealized beauty and naturalism. “And so we have “primitive art”, the expression of a collective ideology, perpetuated by abstraction which has found its “religious” expression in the idea of the soul; “Classical art”, based on a “social” art-concept, perpetuated by “idealization”, which has found its purest expression in the conception of beauty; and, lastly, modern art, based on the concept of individual genius and perpetuated by concretization, which has found its clearest expression in the personality-cult of the artistic individuality itself.” Although Rank is clear that a “type” of artist, and a “type” of art are impossible to categorize, he does use classic categories to describe and explain how the will works in terms of life impulse and death fear. In discussing the creative type in contrast to the neurotic, for example, he notices how Apolloninan and Dionysian have basically represented two types; one corresponding to a modern psychopathic-impulse type and the other to the neurotic volitional type. “The one creates more from fullness of powers and sublimation, the other more from exhaustion and compensation.” In a sort-of classic Rankian style, he continues in a way that required me several turns to grasp how he is using terms like “life”. “The work of the one is entire in every single expression, that of the other is partial even in its totality, for the one lives itself out, positively, in the work, while the other pays with the work—pays, not to society (for both do that), but to life itself, from which the one strives to win freedom by self-willed creation whereas for the other the thing created is the expression of life itself.” In both cases, life is a driving force, in two directions, and fear of death can similarly inspire action, or inaction, as the case may be. “There is (as I have shown) a double sort of fear: on one hand the fear of life which aims at avoidance or postponement of death, and on the other the fear of death which underlies the desire for immortality. According to the compromise which men make between these two poles of fear, and the predominance of one or the other form, there will be various dynamic solutions of this conflict, which hardly permit of description by type-labeling.” In general, communal symbolic experiences organize the life of an individual in primitive society. Classical art obviously promotes the individual genius, but the individual’s life is only partially invested because the creation pays homage to the strong ideology. Our modern artist can perpetually create without absorbing much of life, or partially grab parts of life for the purpose of throwing it into his work. 10 “It is an egotistical artist-type of this order that Ibsen has described in so masterly a fashion. He needs, as it were, for each work that he builds, a sacrifice which is buried alive to ensure a permanent existence to the structure, but also to save the artist from having to give himself. The frequent occasions when a great work of art has been created in the reaction following upon the death of a close relation seem to me to realize those favorable cases for this type of artist in which he can dispense with the killing of the building’s victim because the victim has died a natural death and has subsequently, to all appearances, had a monument piously erected to him.”1 “Thus, as the artist-type becomes more and more individualized, he appears on the one hand to need a more individual ideology—the genius concept—for his art, while on the other his work is more subjective and more personal, until finally he requires for the justification of his production an individual “public” also: a single person for whom ostensibly he creates.” This leads to the Greek boy-love that is a classic idealization of self identification, and which the Christian Exemplar-Master subsequently appropriates. The Shakespearean sonnets classically express with great clearness this idea of oneness with the friend, to the point of monotony. What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? And what i’st but mine own when I praise thee? Sonnet XXXIX “A certain type of artist, for whom Goethe may stand as the model, will learn to deal with his experiences and conflicts economically and in the end wisely, while another type exhausts his strength in chasing after stimulating experiences so that his conflict does not come out in production. For the artist himself the fact that he creates is more immediately important than what he produces, although we are inclined to make his classification as a particular type depend upon the result, his art-work. Here again we find ourselves at a point where art as the result of production must be sharply differentiated from the artist as a creative individual. There is, in fact, no norm for the artists as a type, although we are constantly tempted to set up more or less precisely formulated norms both for art and for the individual work of art. Production is a vital process which happens within the individual and is independent at the outset from the ideology manifested in the created work. On the other hand, the work can show an equal independence towards the artist who has created it, and can in favourable instances be compared with other works within the categories of art; but it can never be compared with its author or with the artist as a psychological type. Between the two—artist and art—there stands Life, now dividing, now uniting, now checking, now promoting. “This leads us to the profoundest source of the artistic impulse to create, which I can only satisfactorily explain to myself as the struggle of the individual against an inherent striving after totality, which forces him equally in the direction of a complete surrender to life and a complete giving of himself in production. He has to save himself from this 1Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Mozart’s Don Juan are familiar examples of the reaction after a father’s death, while Wagner’s Lohengrin followed on the death of the composer’s mother. These works are supreme examples of the artist negotiating with the problem of the Beyond. To these instances may be added Ibsen’s epilogue When We Dead Awake; here the death is that of the artist himself.) 11 totality by fleeing, now from the Scylla of life, now from the Charybdis of creation, and his escape is naturally accomplished only at the cost of continual conflict, both between these two spheres and within each of them separately. How this conflict and triumph over it is manifested in creative working we shall seek to show in the chapter on The Artist’s Fight with Art. For the moment we are dealing only with manifestations and attempted solutions within the sphere of life, irrespective of whether these are concerned with persons of the same or the opposite sex.” The Muse thus becomes as example of an artist using life to create work. Relations with the opposite sex are more complex because of the opposition where women in classical times are often distractions, even evil, compared to the homo self-love which merely mirrors the individual. The muse represents romantic love, in contrast to the domestic wife, and both, or either, may be cast-off when a particular work is done, or when they no longer serve their purpose, while an idealized muse might be eternally unattainable. Rank turns from this discussion to a comment on the Oedipus complex which he discusses in terms of the sexual experience common to all. He does this in order to emphasize that the individual response is most important. After the familiar admission of following Freud’s biological ideology to distraction, he returns to the will as an individual difference that makes something new of the biological, psychological and characteriological sides of the classic story. The will is not subject to the experiences we all have. It returns us to the fundamental process of artistic production, which consists in just this deliberate appropriation of that which happens and is given (including passive experiences) in the form of a new creation. Deliberate appropriation defines the artist whose art is a new creation, and whose negotiation with life necessarily must deal with the inevitable death. The more personal the art, the more the artist needs justification, ultimately as an individual audience; the life and work are a balance of this urge to create and the need for life. Experience is necessary for self-formation, but that does not create the artist. “This Oedipus experience is a creative experience, for it serves to create the myth itself, and the sagas, poems, and tragedies based on it, whose various representations of the one theme are determined by the collective ideological outlook of the moment and the interpretation appropriate thereto. But the life of the individual hero himself will inevitably be destroyed, whether this human destiny be interpreted in terms of heroism, fatalism, or tragedy.” 12 Chapter 3 Art-Form and Ideology What am I myself? What have I done? All that I have seen, heard, noted I have collected and used. My works are reverenced by a thousand different individuals . . . Often I have reaped the harvest that others have sown. My work is that of a collective being and it bears Goethe’s name. Hegel The relation of an individual to the society is one of Rank’s enduring investigations. In art, there is a similar unity and difference in the way that form and content not only constitute an inseparable unity, but actually express one and the same thing in two different ways. In the third chapter of Art and Artist, Rank classifies three general ideologies (primitive, classical and modern) to directly address the manner in which an artist achieves both the unity which constitutes a work of art and the harmonious combination of the current ideology with a personal ideology. A number of individual types are discussed in this context, with the conclusion that understanding the psychology of an individual does not translate to an understanding or appreciation of art. This naturally leads to a discussion of will for the creative type, and the personal craving for immortality of the ego. There are countless ways to classify ideological periods, and Rank’s choosing three might be the place where many readers abandon his work, but I have found them to be useful. Primitive art is based on a collective soul-ideology, achieving unity through abstraction of style, Classical art is based on the æsthetic ideology of beauty, achieving unity through conformity and sheer identification with the ideology of the people, and Modern art is based on the psychological ideology of the artist-type, achieving unity through his reaction to the discrepancies existing both within the artist himself and between his personal ideology and the prevailing collective ideology. Primitive art is static, classical is harmonious, and romantic art is dynamic. The first is ornamental, the second plastic and figuring (vital), and the third is poetical and musical (rhythmical). Despite overlapping frontiers and outstanding personalities at all stages of development (where exceeding the limits of the proper sphere are part of what makes the art great), we generally find primitive 13 art perpetuated through abstraction in flat and linear ornamentation that celebrates a collective belief, classical achievement of immortality comes-through idealization of the god in man trying to preserve the body in permanent materials (marble statues, grand architectures, self-portraits, etc.), and our modern romantic vivification (the artist himself as the new creation) achieved at the cost of real life in overcoming the fear of death from which the immortality-idea and urge to externalization first sprang. The abstract, æsthetic and realistic are based on varying attitudes toward life which the artist himself adopts as he seeks to become immortal along with his work. A work of art not only represents unity of form and content, but it also achieves a unification of personal and collective ideologies of immortality. “If then, on the one hand, the artist’s ideology is in complete harmony with the collective ideology of his time—is, indeed, the most complete expression of it—it is possible that the essential factor of his creative dynamism arises from a personal conflict between the individual death-problem and the collective immortality idea of the particular cultural period.” The primitive artist, of whom we know nothing, nevertheless seems to have broken away, as an individual, to make their mark on the world by imprinting the abstract soul belief onto dead materials (wood, bone, etc.) in a new creation. Great artists in the classical period likewise produce new creations by reacting to the accepted ideology that provides powerful symbols revered by society. Goethe represents, for Rank, a classical artist who achieves the perfect balance of an individual with their art and ideology; an artist who achieves great productivity without completely sacrificing life or human relations. In any case, all artists make a deliberate appropriation of that which happens and of-that which is given, and they do this in the form of an individual new creation. As we move from the primitive to the classical, for example, we find the unknown storyteller (who, like the hero they exalt, achieves a victory through an individual act that mostly matters in the story’s conclusion for how it secures the success of a nation or race) becoming a poet like Homer who begins to exalt himself in attachment to the hero; the poet becomes capable of producing personal immortality for the hero as well as himself. In classical art, even-with the examples of artists pushing the boundaries of acceptability, the results are ultimately judged by society and appropriated in the collective, social ideology. In modern work, I think of how Stanley Kubrick understands such a classical view when he chooses Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz to introduce a movie about a completely ordered society that will deconstruct into a psychedelic individual immortality. These examples at least support Rank’s earlier discussion about the development of a genius cult of personality where van Gogh’s ear is as interesting as his starry night, where Picasso and Warhol become famous and rich in their own lifetime, and where the modern rock star kills himself in willful rejection of being a rock star. Rank’s use of Goethe as a classic, and classically-balanced, example illustrates that the psychology of a productive personality gives no clue to the understanding and appreciation of such great art. Goethe’s self-conscious recognition of his own appropriation is a useful art-ideology for Goethe, but other individuals must work-out their own satisfaction. “On the other hand, creativity itself is, of course, a special form of experience and one peculiar to the artist, and all depends in the last resort upon whether the individual is capable of restoring harmony, or at least a temporary balance, between the two forms of experience - artistic and vital - and to what extent he succeeds. This does not by any means signify that the person who better adapts himself to, or succeeds in, life must-needs be the better artist. In this respect Goethe forms a single exception in the whole long line of really great men whose lives have been swallowed whole by their work. Croce maintains that this was the case even with Goethe, but in reality the man Goethe 14 has come to be more important to us than his work, which we are inclined to regard as more interesting from a psycho-biographical than from a purely artistic standpoint. Goethe himself looked upon his works as “fragments of one great confession,” as “life’s traces,” and it looks as if this had been more or less consciously the artist’s general attitude towards his work. His work is not only his particular expression of life: it both serves him and helps him to live, and his worth as an artist comes second - or even plays no special part at all. A mediocre work, acceptable only to a small circle, may yet satisfy the artist more and mean more to him than the undying world-fame of a poem that has grown into a folk-song, the author of which most people are quite at a loss to name.” This leads back to the problem of the individual will. For Rank, the will is a human phenomenon, and he doesn’t assume that all creatures possess it, even in the form of “unconscious willing.” He affirms that the will is derivative of the biological life-impulse, but it is a purely human derivative whose dynamic our modern leaders of psychology [sic] have failed to recognize and address. In any case, the will supremely is individual while the ideology is social and collective. Thus, the individual urge to immortality finds its religious expression in affirmation of the culture. This is why even an out-of-bounds artistic achievement, once recognized, changes the ideology of the culture that affirms the individual work in collective appropriation. The sexual explanation completely fails at this level, and Rank denies that, even at the lowest stage in primitive art, where the abstract symbol is based on sexual reproduction and a close relationship of the unconscious will to the instinctive, that in any creative production, the two ever come together. While Rank says he cannot ascribe the individuality-consciousness to animals (or at least not in the same degree), he does appreciate Lamarck’s bold postulate that “achievement” is not simple reproduction and repetition even for creatures. Survival of the fittest means that those who survive are judged to be fit, which incorrectly leads us to predicate some sort of deliberate intention, and hence we cannot assume the artist’s intention from how we judge their artistic production. With humans, and with art, Rank does ascribe individual consciousness, and that results in a unique relation between an individual and the collective ideology in terms of immortality craving. This self-consciousness, for the modern individual, is more acutely experienced compared to the primitive (whose collective belief is soulful in everyday living), or to the classical artist (whose world was surrounded by religious affirmation in permanent, structural symbolism). The modern experience of this fear of death is different from the past. “If Goethe’s importance lies rather in his representing the purely Classical ideal, as against the personal artist-ideology of Romanticism, than in his actual creative work, he is perhaps the first example—and at the same time the highest possible type—of the poet who becomes a universal genius. Also, in our own day, such a type could express himself as an essayist, a cultural critic, or a first-class journalist. As we have already pointed out, our modern author has become conscious of the personal art-ideology that is within him; but the first result of the process has been to project this intuitively recognized artist-ideology on to the history of art and to misinterpret the whole of its development in the light of its latest phase.” The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the nature of an individual, the will, and the sex-impulse from which it derives. “The will, conscious or unconscious, will always be the expression of the individual, the indivisible single being while sexuality represents something shared, something 15 generic which is harmonious with the individually—willed only in the human loveexperience and is otherwise in perpetual conflict with it. In art this conflict is won in a different way; though closely akin to the individual conquest in love and the collective conquest in religion, it is differentiated from both by a specific element which we may broadly call the æsthetic. We shall deal with the peculiar qualities which this consists of in our next section. In closing this chapter we need only say, without particularizing, that the artistic solution of this original dualism is not merely psychological, but appears, as regards its evolutionary history, to lie between the religious and the erotic solutions. The religious solution is at bottom collective; that is, the individual is delivered from his isolation and becomes part of a greater and higher whole—not in the biological- generic sense, but through his spiritual ideology, by becoming one with God. In the love-experience, which becomes possible only at a stage of fully developed individualism, we see this spiritual process objectified: God, as representing the idealized self, is found in the beloved, and, with the sense of union, the individuality seems to be exalted and intensified, lost, and yet enriched. Finally, in art, which has developed out of the collective consolation-ideology of religion and at whose further limit we find the Romantic artist striving after the complete love-experience, the individuality-conflict is solved in that the ego, seeking at once isolation and union, creates, as it were, a private religion for itself, which not only expresses the collective spirit of the epoch, but produces a new ideology—the artistic—which for the bulk of them takes the place of religion. True, this happens only at the summit of individual “artist’s art,” where there is deification of the genius-concept and an adoration of works of art which is comparable only to the worship of statues of gods, though they already represent mere men. Before this, art is still - particularly in its Classical period - an individual workingout of the forces of which religions are made. These forces then become concentrated in the single creative individual, whereas before they animated a whole community. The works of these peak periods of artistic production manifest in their development the individualized religion-forming forces which finally return, by way of Romantic love-experience, to their origin, which is the personal craving for immortality of the ego. All three ideologies, however—the collective-religious, the social-artistic, and the individual-erotic—lift the individual above the biological life-plane of reality—in which only the sexual immortality of propagation counteracts the individual isolation—on a higher, supernatural, super-real, or super-individual sphere wherein reigns an ideal collectivity that is created by individual intention and may at any time be altered at will.” 16 Chapter 4 The Play-Impulse and Æsthetic Pleasure All fine imaginative work is selfconscious and deliberate. No poet sings because he must sing. At least no great poet does. It is so now, and it has always been so . . . There is no fine art without selfconsciousness. Oscar Wilde (The Critic as Artist) What do play and pleasure have to do with art? Well, messing-around with mud, paint or the piano can be aimless fun. Many creatures display the play-impulse, and Rank investigates how humans play with art and why. Fear of death, of the unreal and irrational, underlies the development of religion, and art is an early handmaiden in our urge to renunciation and perpetuation. The play impulse in art strives for a “successful” partialization harmonizing what is unreal fear with the urge to eternalization. What is it that drives the artist’s will-to-form first now in abstraction, then by imitation or later by introjection? The natural world produces æsthetically pleasing beauty, but art is a human creation and great art reflects the super-real character of our soul. How is the artist able to create this feeling in the observer? We have seen that, in combination with religion, primitive art, by those living close to nature, tends toward abstract objectification by imitating, as faithfully as possible, not reality but unreality. Classical art, likewise, and modern art, must also convey this sense of the unreal, even with imitation, in order to illustrate, for the receiver, the desirable soul of a Mona Lisa or our loathing of the death in Guernica. The sense of aimlessness in this activity obviously combines with something that is more than mere imitation, and we can’t claim that aimless play causes or explains the willful creativity. The classic classicist Schiller, in trying to resolve artistic creativity and æsthetic pleasure, said that the artist lives in both a world of the senses (reality) and the will (moral). Rank takes this as a beginning for investigating how the play instinct is both imitative and creative, and he 17 sees the unreal part being mostly ignored by art historians. “From this height of æsthetic-philosophic contemplation it only remains to flash a light into spiritual abysses, as did Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy, or to descend oneself into the depths of psycho-biological processes, after the manner of the psycho-analytical treatment of art.” He criticizes all the biological, anthropological, sociological, psychological and historical analysis that fails to get beyond aimless imitation of reality as the explanation for playful creativity. Reality is not a completely explanatory principle. Fear of death, and fear of life, ironically unravel how playful activity between reality and morality calls-forth the original soul belief that first inspired religion, and secondarily developed with art as its original handmaiden. Investigating Schiller’s dualism with his own clinical work, Rank considers what we might be able to know of the modern artist by examining the neurotic as a failed artist; as one who fails in play. “In other words, to the eternalizing tendency of the individual will (as manifested collectively in religion and personally in the love-experience) there must be superadded a particular kind of overcoming of fear; and this we can certainly study better in the failed neurotic with his thwarted productivity than in the creative artist. For the artist overcomes this isolating fear socially, by getting society’s sanction for his personal immortality-symbolism, whereas the neurotic fails to overcome his mortal fear because he has nothing to compensate it, either individually (in love), or collectively (in religion), or, least of all, socially.” Fear, at bottom, is an irrational phenomenon. Even for the primitive, fear is not actual fear— fear of external dangers—but an inward fear of the unreal, and precisely because of its intangibility. Fear of death is different than fright, and it is Rank’s characterization of “life-fear” that informs his understanding of creativity. “In so far, therefore, as the negative-inhibitive fear of life, as well as the positive will to perpetuation, acts in the creation of ideologies (including artistic ideologies), we have to deal with a second unreal factor. To put it in another way, the fear that urges towards perpetuity is precisely as unreal—or, shall we say, illusory or fantastic—as the positive will-to-art that builds up for itself a second reality next above, parallel with, or inside the first. But neither of these two tendencies alone is capable of constructing an ideology, be it of a religious, an artistic, or a social character; it requires the two together, cooperating according to the needs of the moment, to do that. Yet they are not one, they are not causally connected in such a way that the fear of death leads to the will to externalization, or the complete achievement of the will to externalization leads to the fear of life.” This repeats Rank’s basic thesis, that the unreal element is the decisive factor leading to expression in art. This is not a result of the real, but is an idealism a priori anchored beyond all reality, which the will to eternalize objectifies in the immortality-concept. “This specifically artistic immortality-ideology renders its creator immortal along with his work, by putting, on a work which expresses the prevailing collective ideology, 18 the stamp of the individual artist-personality. This intermediate character of the work of art, which links the world of subjective unreality with that of objective reality— harmoniously fusing the edges of each without confusing them—has been superbly turned to account by the play-instinct, as Schiller æsthetically conceived it.” Human beings uniquely appreciate beauty and pleasure as practical and good (Socrates) or reflecting an ideal world of the beyond (Plato). Conservation of energy is a principle at work in representing such appreciation because the good life should come easy, in some respect, and Rank credits Freud as the first to recognize this in both play and pleasure. We can’t assume that this means that the artist is seeking to arouse feelings of pleasure in the receiver, and pleasure cannot be stated as the cause of playful creativity in the first place. The interaction, however, suggests a Socratic sense of beauty being the good and practical, and creative representation calls-forth Plato’s concept of a shadow world where the work of art represents an ideal of the beauty-concept from the originating soul-concept; in other words, the supernatural. Freud suggested that the saving of energy is essential to the pleasure derived from wit and, eventually, to all æsthetic pleasure (but, Rank adds, “his view of libidinous prevented him from extending this conception to the nature of pleasure generally, the purest form of which is, from a philosophic point of view, æsthetic pleasure.”) If pleasure depends on a certain brevity, and the temporary quantitative principle of economy, (where that of non-pleasure is the prolongation of any state, even one that was at first pleasurable) then Rank argues for a partial feature, and arrives at a general formula for pleasure as the result of a successful “partialization” in which avoidance of fear is enhanced. (Joyce presents a similar æsthetic in, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” but also includes the opposite feeling, loathing, in his explanation of the pure æsthetic.) In any case, æsthetic appreciation includes both real and unreal features. This returns us to the case of the neurotic as someone who fails in play, who has a life-fear, who loathes to get dirty, compared to the artist who is able to pour the whole of himself into his work while conserving part of his life in the successful partialization. Æsthetic pleasure is an ideal pleasure because it supposes, for the one who enjoys the work, reception and gain, but not giving, while the artist also conserves his life even while spending it in creation. In this sense, the artist “rests” after his work, and is capable of enjoying the æsthetic pleasure alongside receivers of the work.1 “For when he creates, the artist uses the whole of himself without being in danger of losing that self therein, for it is certain that the work itself, from his point of view, represents only a part of his ego, although it does in fact represent the whole artist and his personality. It is just, like every good symbol, a pars pro toto solution, in which, however, the artist does not go charily with his life, like the neurotic, but positively spends it as he creates. This again he does not actually, but essentially—that is, he puts into it his being, his “soul” as we say—and this then stands for the whole living ego, just as the abstract soul in primitive and later immortality-beliefs represents not only the whole individual, but even more than that: his essence, and with it the essence of man and of humans in general. Once more we find art expressing the same thing as the abstract-soul concept, only in an objectified form, which we call beautiful precisely 1 It would be an interesting thesis to investigate “successful partialization” in terms of arrested attention. Rank’s insight about death-fear, life-fear, and the urge to externalization seems naturally associated with loathing as well as desire. “—Art,” said Stephen, “is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” James Joyce, “Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man” 19 in so far as it is unreal “more than earthly.” For this very essence of a man, his soul, which the artist puts into his work and which is represented by it, is found again in the work by the enjoyer, just as the believer finds his soul in religion or in God, with whom he feels himself to. be one. It is on this identity of the spiritual, which underlies the concept of collective religion, and not on a psychological identification with the artist, that the pleasurable effect of the work of art ultimately depends, and the effect is, in this sense, one of deliverance. The self-renunciation which the artist feels when creating is relieved when he finds himself again in his accomplished work, and the self-renunciation which raises the enjoyer above the limitations of his individuality becomes, through, not identification, but the feeling of oneness with the soul living in the work of art, a greater and higher entity. Thus the will-to-form of the artist gives objective expression, in his work, to the soul’s tendency to self-eternalization, while the æsthetic pleasure of the enjoyer is enabled, by his oneness with it, to participate in this objectivization of immortality. But both of them, in the simultaneous dissolution of their individuality in a greater whole, enjoy, as high pleasure, the personal enrichment of that individuality through this feeling of oneness. They have yielded up their mortal ego for a moment, fearlessly and even joyfully, to receive it back in the next, the richer for this universal feeling.” 20 Chapter 5 Microcosm and Macrocosm This Atman (human being) that I have in my heart is smaller than a grain of rice, smaller than an oat, smaller than a mustard-seed . . . This Atman that I have in my heart is greater than the globe, greater than the expanse of air, greater than the heavens, greater than all spaces of the universes. In it are all deeds, all scents, all tastes contained; it embraces all, it speaks not and cares for naught. This Atman that I have in my heart, it is this Brahman. With it I become One when I depart this life. He who has attained to this knowledge, for him verily there is no more doubt. Upanishads 5.1 Micro and Macro I Macrocosm and microcosm, for me, is the historical capstone to Rank’s earlier chapters. He began with the individual psychology of creativity, explored its relation to society as ideology, and tested the anthropology on a principle of pleasure and play. This chapter traces cultural change from a spiritual primitive world-view to an intellectual Oriental view. The heavens and earth are brought into parallel measurement, expanding the influence of our will beyond the primitive ego. Our modern view of causality scientifically applies the will in another attempt at predetermination. These attempts all center on our interest to increase life and avoid death, but they all ultimately fail. This chilling fact is stated about a third of the way through the chapter. 21 Art work is a unity, temporary and symbolic, in a passing identification between two individuals, providing the potential for restoring a union with the Cosmos; which once existed and now is lost. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is an essential factor in the production of human cultural values. It is our attempt to return to the womb where we were once one with the cosmos, both symbolically floating in the mystically swirling vapors, and practically united with our mother. This is a basic thesis for Rank since his work on *Trauma of Birth*, and in this chapter he examines the human striving towards a super individual unity and its spiritual premises, from the standpoint of those collective world-outlooks in which it has found more or less definite expression. “It is in the world picture of the ancient East that the clearest expression systematic, even if not strictly scientific—of this fundamental unity of the individual with the universe is found.” This understanding of unity develops as an ideological formulation of what was previously only primitive identity with the universe. The cultural change to an Oriental world-view does not lose the primitive identification, but it adds astral parallelism of the heavenly picture and the earthly life. In intellectual terms (if still pre-scientific) the addition, “was only a question of a particular ordering principle of life, founded on astronomical observation. The primitives workingout of the principle was rather terrestrial, whereas the progress of culture seems to be characterized by a celestializing of pure human egocentricity.” Hugo Winckler’s work provides Rank access to the history of Babylonia and Assyria, which he feels might be more accessible to us compared to the magic world-unity of the primitives. It is from Babylon (even the name inspires heavenly desire!) that this astral world-doctrine and astrological religion is said to have traveled over the whole earth. Winckler’s popular description: “The whole universe is the great world, the macrocosm; its parts are small universes in themselves, microcosms. Such a microcosm is man, who is himself an image of the universe and a perfect being. But the great universe is likewise a man, and as it is ‘God,’ God has human form. ‘In his own image,’ therefore, was man created. This was still the belief of medieval medicine, which we know to have had (chiefly for the purpose of bleeding) a method of dividing up the human body according to the twelve signs of the zodiac (head, ram; neck, bull; arms, twins; and so on). On this ‘scientific’ treatment of a patient was based. . . ” “Winckler immediately adds a remark which with one sweep lays bare the whole psychological problem—the problem, namely, of how this theory of parallelism arose and what, in the last resort, it signifies.” Rank says it is limiting to think that the ancients “read-off” their cult myths from the heavens because it doesn’t explain how the myths got up there unsolved in the first place. Even if they are projections of human processes and observations, why anthropomorphize the heavens, and why should the heavens have such significant influence for individual humans and mankind in general? A clear example of this mixing of terrestrial and celestial factors is provided by the Babylonian time-reckoning, of which Winckler says—in continuation of the remarks quoted above— 22 “In the Babylonian mathematical tables the number 12,960,000 is treated over and over again in all its parts and possible combinations in relation to the sexagesimal system .... The significance of this number has been explained to us by Plato, who took it over from the Pythagoreans. According to him, this number was the arithmetical expression for the law controlling the universe. . . . The explanation given . . . is based essentially on the fact that the number of days required to make a human being (in the womb) is 260 . . . The year, reckoned at 360 days, makes 12,960,000 days = 36,000 years, or one hundred times as many days as years. And this, according to Babylonian calculation, is the number of years in a world-age. Plato reckons the duration of a human life at one hundred years (=36,000 days), so that one day of a man’s life corresponds to one year of the universal world-year. Thus the two numbers of man and the universe (and therewith the godhead) are brought into an inward relation: they are mirror-images of one another.” Rank adds, “But we, too, do not get beyond this mirror-image explanation if we merely seize upon the obvious suggestion that these speculations started from human phenomena (birth, duration of pregnancy, etc.) and were subsequently brought into line with celestial time-measurement. For the real question concerns, not the starting-point—whether it was celestial or terrestrial—but the motive for bringing the two groups of phenomena into relation at all.” T.W. Danzel likewise finds a similar association in the 260-day period of the “Tonal-anatl,” which plays a special part in the Mexican calendar. The time-reckoning and calendar-making seem designed to fix good and bad days for certain undertakings and for the curing of sickness. Congruence of female menstruation with phases of the moon, for example, was already familiar to ancient folk-lore. “The calendar symbols,” says Danzel,1 “which considered determination for a given period, are signs for demonic forces that in turn are regarded as the controlling factors of organs and parts of the body, and therefore as having originally a subjective cosignificance.” This relating of microcosmic and macrocosmic positions forms the basis of what Danzel calls the “magic anatomy” intended for practical purposes and for augury. A symbolization of one’s own body seems pervasive, even in our dreams. Recognizing the active imagination, however, is not an explanation of mythical phenomena by psycho-biological happenings. It only leads us back to the problem that it was fetched to solve in the first place: “namely, to that of the particular nature of that type of human thought and imagination which, in contrast to our logical process of thought, is called “unconscious” by Freud, “autistic” by Bleuler, “symbolic” by Jung, “prelogical” by Levy-Bruhl, and “mythical” by Cassierer. All these names, variously as they may be interpreted, are at bottom only modes of emphasizing, as against the older views, the fact that this “primitive” thought of ours—so opposed to our logical and scientific scheme of connecting and concluding—is not purely arbitrary, but obeys, “a law of its own peculiar sort and cast.” . . . 1Mexiko, I, p. 25 23 Figure 5.1: 24 “It seems to me, in fact, that the linking-up of heterogeneous conceptions in the primitive world-picture, which seems to correspond to our mental process of causal association, rests primarily on a special articulation of the universe which alone renders these strange linkages intelligible. This articulation of the universe is done primarily from a purely egocentric point of view which classifies things of the outer world, psychologically speaking, into those belonging to the ego, and therefore forming a part of it, and those not belonging to the ego, which are therefore foreign or hostile to it. In this division of the world into good and bad, to which the ego and non-ego naively correspond, experience of useful and harmful things appear to play a part, if not a decisive one. Otherwise it would be impossible to understand how the Australian or Indian, whose totemistic world-idea is based on some world-classification of this kind, regards a particular tree as belonging to his ego, and a certain other as hostile to it. Supposing, then, as I for my part believe, that to every good thing there must correspond some bad thing, we are brought back to the more important question, what does such a partitioning of the world mean at all? To my mind, it is the same necessity as that which has led us to the causal world-view: that is, the desire to reach the good and avoid the evil by predetermination. The extent to which our intellectual-scientific causality takes account of this necessity is clear enough. But in the primitive, experience, which for want of a scheme of causal connections he cannot have, is replaced by a naive pre-classification which enables him to characterize one group of things as good and clean, and another as unclean, forbidden, or tabu. By avoiding all contact with this second group the primitive expects to avoid all evil, and should evil befall him nevertheless, he takes this as a proof that he has, consciously or unconsciously, violated the scheme of division. We cannot here describe in detail the experiences, or, better, spiritual ideas, on which this primitive division of the universe is based. All that concerns us at this point is to make clear the difference between the primitive and the civilized world-pictures. In the first the notion of dividing appears to me to be what lies at the root of the whole world-outlook; and in the second the principle of uniting. The latter is not, indeed, absent from the primitive world-picture, but it is only a result of the avoidance of certain things dangerous to the ego, while in the civilized world-picture causal linkage stands in the foreground, with avoidance as its result.” The broadest possible dividing principle, Rank says, is needed to explain the significance of the system as Durkheim intended. The fitting of objects into categories either hostile or friendly to the “I” points to one fundamental difference between primitive and modern thought. “This is the notion, arising from the naive immortality-belief that death can be avoided, provided that one knows and avoids the forces threatening the “I” and, at the same time, knows how to use the helpful and strengthening forces to one’s advantage. The essential means to this end is the individual will, which must either be strong enough to fight and control the evil that threatens in the world or good enough to evade or ward off the bad influences. This world-outlook, which perhaps finds not only its finest but also its clearest expression in the Germanic Baldur myth2 can best be described as “magic,” because it presupposes that natural happenings can be influenced by human forces of will and does not merely aspire thereto, as is the case in our practicaltechnical world-scheme. The magic world-classification would thus, at bottom, rest on a 2Baldur could not be slain by his brother, H¨odur, because all things in nature were bound to him in friendship— one may say, were at one with him. Only the mistletoe had contrived to be excluded from the universal oath of unity, and thus became his undoing. As in all myths in which the hero is vulnerable in one spot only, death inevitably breaks through despite all precautions. 25 distinction (not experimental, but volitional) between death-bringing and life-furthering objects, with the consequent tendency to avoid the former and keep the latter favourably disposed.” So, the picture we have is based on the will, where primitive man makes measures, in a spiritual sense, of those objects that give or take life. Further measures are willfully taken in an expansion of culture to the astral world-picture of the Babylonians whose concern with the celestial and terrestrial is aimed at seeing good or evil events in advance, with the intention of avoiding those that are destructive and death-bringing, and bringing about those which bring healing and happiness. The pre-Babylonian Sumerians also originally used astronomical observation for its bearing on personal fate. “This attitude, which even today dominates our scientific ideology and is the foundation of the primitive’s magic world-picture, manifested itself in the ancient Oriental civilization in a form which we are now in a position to regard as the transition from the magic to our scientific world-outlook. For it becomes ever clearer that the practicaltechnical aims attained by astronomy, physics, and chemistry as they grew out of astrology, metaphysics (cosmogonies), and alchemy, were not implicit in the original intention in man, but asserted themselves as gradual results of the increasing cognition and recognition of his dependent relation to nature. In the beginning, then, man did not observe the stars for the purpose of an objective chronology, but had greater problems and higher aims in mind. What interested him was life and death, life’s span and death’s dangers, and the origin which he hoped might disclose possibilities of rebirth to defeat his transience. What he finally found, however, was a measurement, as exact as possible, of the primary clock presented by the rotation of the heavenly bodies. What he sought was a means of influencing the duration of time in the sense of the desire for immortality, and he did not find it.” 5.2 Micro and Macro II We learned at the beginning of Microcosm and Macrocosm about, “a driving motive for the projection—or, better, the relating of human and heavenly (cosmic) phenomena: the individual is thereby lifted out of his uncertain everyday life and above his mere primitive identity with the All and becomes identified with the regularly recurring and consequently imperishable stars. Amongst these stars, as we know for certain, it was the moon that played the chief, or at least the original role— and naturally, since this heavenly body is differentiated from all the rest by its gradual waxing and waning, which positively invite comparison with organic growth and decay.” The divine king was the first character to act on this cosmic stage, and how his soul enters and leaves the world is a microcosm of life in the macro universe. Rank identifies the cultural change from being a creature to a creative being who places immortality bets on both the macrocosmic eternal stars and the microcosm of the human body. Mankind literally examines his navel and gives close inspection to the liver as the seat of all life. Our entrails, as a womb, or labyrinth, also lead back from the individual insides to the macrocosmic overthrow of the chthonian-animalistic world-view. This results in the classical Greek separation of gods above and hell below which the Christians democratize as the immortal individual soul. 26 This section of Microcosm and Macrocosm, built on early ethnography, has some great imagery and symbolism of our foundational beliefs. Burials abound, of course, but the key feature is the dual approach to soul belief where the soul either gets its start at death (which is why preparing a house for its journey becomes important) or the soul of the living just goes on living somewhere else when the body stops living (which is why cathedrals honoring the living soul are important). Early in the process, the housing of the soul is reserved for a divine king, whose life is prescribed to the finest detail by celestial ordination. The king is ceremoniously killed (with family or favored servants) as an honor, and sometimes he is bound (the corpse literally tied with ropes) so-as not to return. In other ceremonies (if he’s well-liked) he’s given some way to get back. Rank uses material from a number of early ethnographers, including Frobenius, and highlights the Fanany burial with its soul worm as a particular interest in the evolution of the rebirth idea. This idea of a small, soul-bearing worm expands in other cultures to include small, crawling animals, birds, and larger creatures of mixed descent like the Sphinx leading to the Osiris myth in Egypt. “Certainly the idea of the womb as an animal has been widespread among different races of all ages, and it ’furnishes an explanation of (for instance) the second burial custom discovered by Frobenius along with the Fanany burial in South Africa. This consisted in placing the dead king’s body in an artificially emptied hull’s skin in such a manner that the appearance of life was achieved. This bull-rite was undoubtedly connected with the moon-cult (compare our “mooncalf,” even today) and belongs therefore to the above-mentioned maternal culture-stage, at which the rebirth idea also made use of maternal animal symbols, the larger mammals being chosen. Yet we must not overlook the fact that this“mother’s womb symbolism” denotes more than the mere repetition of a person’s own birth: it stands for the overcoming of human mortality by assimilation to the moon’s immortality. This sewing-up of the dead in the animal skin has its mythical counterpart in the swallowing of the living by a dangerous animal, out of which he escapes by a miracle. Following an ancient microcosmic symbolism, Anaximander compared the mother’s womb with the shark. This conception we meet later in its religious form as the Jonah myth, and it also appears in a cosmological adaptation in the whale myths collected in Oceania by Frobenius. Hence, also, the frequent suggestion that the seat of the soul after death (macrocosmic underworld) is in the belly of an animal (fish, dragon). The fact that in these traditions the animals are always those dangerous to man indicates that the animal womb is regarded not only as the scene of a potential rebirth but also as that of a dreaded mortality, and it is this which led to all the cosmic assimilations to the immortal stars. Thus we perceive a development of the belief in the soul, ranging from the denial of maternal origin (as a symbol of mortality) to the assumption of divine descent from the imperishable stars, with the king (or chief) at first as earthly representative thereof. This development, which has left a precipitate in art-history also, goes, however, beyond the animal, and the final result of the whole process, in the early Oriental world-picture, is the transfer of the animal to heaven.” Mankind basically places an immortality bet on both the everlasting stars and on regeneration of a cthonian animal nature. This evolution of the soul-concept is parallel with the origin and expression of the creative urge itself. “Whereas in the beginning the soul-concept was concerned only with the keeping of something given—that is, with the conservation of life—the essence of creativity lies first in the ability to regenerate something lost and eventually in the triumph of 27 Figure 5.2: Egyptian Grave Stele, 3200 B.C. (Bird and snake) 28 new-creating something that had never existed. On the basis of this formulation it is easy to fix the point at which the sexual ideology became important to man, attaining a significance which it had never before possessed and was subsequently to lose. After all, it can neither be used to preserve man’s own life (being, on the contrary, regarded as hostile to the ego), nor can it make possible the new creation of that which never existed; its sole use lies in the re-generation of what has been lost; and therefore, at a particular stage of development that has not yet reached real creativity, it becomes a symbol of human—namely, of reproductive- power.” In the ancient Oriental world-outlook, at its climax in the Babylonian culture, we find, side by side with the well-developed macrocosmic system (with man on-level with the universe) a primitive technique of soothsaying using the entrails of animals to deduce favorable or unfavorable portents. Man once again turns inward to find his future. The high stage of this cultural advance is the inspection of the liver which was based not only on anatomical knowledge but also on a better-founded conception of the soul. It is a vital organ which, to this day, shows the inheritance of its super-individual nature from as far back as 2000 BC. The liver as the seat of life counted as a small-scale cosmos; a copy of the whole man, like the soul is a copy of his essence. Certain parts of the liver were given names such as fissure, mouth, and finger, while others are called the mountain, street palace and gate of the liver. The navel, likewise, takes on a similar symbolization, but this time with the exterior rather than the interior of the body. As the world-navel also counted as the entrance to the earth’s belly the underworld—it was at the same time regarded as the starting point of the world’s creation. “We shall show, in our next chapter, how the navel attained to such importance, and here we need only point out that the basic idea of chthonian creation, in that it is based on an animal analogy, is older than the supernatural, heavenly creation. In conformity with this development of man from biological creature to creative and self-creative spirit, the earth’s interior (corresponding to the female abdomen) was looked upon as the centre of creation and consequently was conceived of as the belly of an animal. Later the whole body came to be the (earthly) underworld, and the head (consciousness, will; spirit) became heaven, which eventually became identified with man, just as the earth had been with woman (mother).” As Rank leads us toward the next chapter on architecture, he reiterates, “the selfsame principle that psychologically we have had to take as the basis of every artistic creation: namely, the creative self-representation by means of which the individual frees himself from his dependence on a biological mortality in order to immortalize himself in durable material.” If the macrocosmization reached its peak in the ancient Orient, leading to religion and star-worship, then the microcosmization reaches its peak in the Greek style that underlies art and artistic creation. The Babylonian world-picture is the critical point of transition of this development process which converts the animalistic-cthonian world-picture into the spiritual, heavenly one. It is from the labyrinth, and the entrails symbolizing the womb as a housing for the soul, that creative man emerges like an invader from the Trojan Horse. “The development of the soul-concept, therefore, as it has been determined by the collective ideology (including artistic creativity) of the nations, presents itself to us as 29 Figure 5.3: 30 Figure 5.4: 31 the perpetual association and rivalry of two groups of ideas: the one is the notion of a life after death in the same form as that familiar to the living; the other, the idea of return in a new form, which varies with the cultural development. The first idea of a simple extension of life in another locality, but in the same form, is undoubtedly the earlier and more primitive conception, which sees death only as a migration to another region. Corresponding with this is the conception of the dead soul, generally regarded today as the most primitive of ideas on soul; here the soul only appears with death; the living man has no“soul”-needs none, so to say- for the soul at this stage is only an expression for the altered life extended into the beyond, this being originally imagined as under the earth, in the grave. The grave thus becomes the house of the soul- that is, that of a human being who is living on elsewhere- and for this reason house and tomb are inseparably linked (as we shall show in the following chapter) and only intelligible through each other.” . . . “In most religious customs and traditions, as well as in the corresponding artistic representations, we find the two immortality-ideologies side by side, as if man sought to ensure himself doubly against any doubt of the possibility of a continuation of existence. Still (as we have already observed) the varying attitude of man towards the animal at different culture-stages serves as one of our most enlightening fossil guides to the reconstruction of the history of man’s rise from creature to creator- which means, from religion to art.” Rank goes on to discuss, over several pages, the details of the entrails and labyrinthian symbolism. The maze-puzzle is overcome by a powerful hero who destroys the prison despite being guarded by a monster animal or mixed-creature like the Minotaur. Rank’s examples, and the ancient nature of the symbolism, suggest how a modern artist might tap into ancient beliefs with these simple signs and pictures. A vase made after a Greek model on Italian soil in the sixth or seventh century BC—the curious Tragliatella vase—holds particular fascination in that it combines the Cretan Minotaur saga with the famous fable of the wooden horse. In the principal drawing on this vase, the warriors mounted on horseback are seen coming out of a labyrinthian spiral which may be both a symbol for Troy and the heroes who smuggled themselves out of the interior of the horse. We see how far and wide Rank ranges in his study, and here he ends the discussion in order to return to the principle of æstheticizing extroversion. “In the place of the inner entrail-spirals which were still the dominant ornament in the Cretan culture-zone, there appears not only the stylized animal body itself (the horse), but also the human being as he works himself gradually loose from his animal base, emerging eventually as the idealized figure of the Olympian who has triumphed over the chthonian-animalistic principle. This idealization-process we are able to follow step by step in the general development of Greek art, as I have indicated in the artistic portion of my Trauma of Birth. Compare first of all the animal figures of Greece (in particular the Sphinx and the Centaur) with their Oriental forerunners; the animal head of the Egyptian gods changes into the human upper body of the Sphinx- and Centaur-figures, whose lower parts (back portions), on the other hand, have become animal; and this is quite in keeping with the development we have described from the culture of the belly to that of the head.’ Thus the victory of the artistic (æsthetic) over the Dionysiac-animalistic (goat), and its advance to the divine-Apollonian, which Nietzsche so brilliantly depicts in his earliest work: The Birth of Tragedy, stands as the imperishable cultural achievement of the Greeks. And simultaneously with this they 32 Figure 5.5: Figure 5.6: abstracted from their predecessors’ materialistic and totemistic conception of rebirth that purely human conception of the soul, which not only was worked out in thought for the first time by their philosophers (Plato), but also lives on immortally in their works of art.” Figure 5.7: “Next, the Christian ideology raised this human idea of the soul—already far removed from the soul of the dead- into a purely spiritual sphere (though without at first endowing it with divinity), and at the same time it democratized the immortal soul, which before had been the prerogative of kings, heroes, or creative people (artists). This 33 Figure 5.8: Figure 5.9: Egyptian Ceiling 34 democratization of the soul-concept had a great share in the flowering of Christian art, which expanded over more than a thousand years, and this was because it had again become essentials in the beginnings of abstract artistic creativity- to objectify the human substrate of this abstraction for the world at large, to concretize it in figures of Christ, Mary with the Child, and so on. Everything had to have happened really and truly as it was said to have done, and what Church art put forth, therefore, was the tangible figuration of a soul-ideology which was becoming more and more cosmopolized and whose human qualities would soon have disappeared but for the saving influence of Christian art. As it was, Christian art—which, in contrast to Christian dogmatics, remained the layman’s province- became permeated again by the human element, particularly in the mother-and-child relation, which was here represented spiritually by heavenly love, whereas in the beginning what had been symbolized was its animal underworld significance. Gradually this underworld was transferred to the Christian hell, which thereafter represented terror and the negation of all hope of rebirth. Yet even in the everlasting flames which condemn to incessant torment the sinner who clings to carnal rebirth we can recognize the yearning for immortality. In this sense hell not only is the symbol of animality, but becomes that of everything earthly and of a final forcible separation of this from the intellectual and spiritual. Those artists, however, who, like Dante or the Breughel type of hellpainters, chose to depict it in terms of an earthly life banished to the underworld were actually only giving us a copy of life on earth as this presented itself to Christianity- that is, as a preparation for the higher life in heaven.” Figure 5.10: Tragliatella vase Ernst Krause monograph3 3Die nordische Herkunft der Trojasage bezeugt durch den Krug von Tragliatella, eine dritthalbtausendj¨abrige Urkunde (with twelve illustrations; Glogau, 1893). 35 Figure 5.11: Rodin’s Female Centaur (Soul and Body) 36 Chapter 6 House Building and Architecture Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? I Corinthians iii, 16 Figure 6.1: Ming Graves Near Peking (1338-1644 A.D.) 37 I thought Chapter Six, House-Building and Architecture, would be easier to review. It’s not, and hence this over-lengthy essay contains the usual use of block quotes needed to help convey the full context. Rank does consistently apply a pattern of description for primitive, classical and modern ideology, and he describes and explains changes in building style according to the self-creative impulse. “Man never gets away from his animal nature—neither desires nor should desire to do so—but the starting point of all the problems, whether religious, artistic, or scientific, lies beyond this self-evident statement; it begins with the question: what is the attitude taken by the culture of the day or the individual vessel thereof towards this prime phenomenon of humanness?” The rich details he provides about tombs, temples and towns illustrates man’s roundabout path through the imperishable cosmos in order to create out of himself on the humanized earth immortal cultural values which survive him. The early 19th Century may have been a unique time when exceptional people could keepup with all the current research, and Rank appears to have managed it. The primitive tombs, or animal burial rites, are followed in detail over centuries as they evolve into the æsthetically religious temple and our inheritance of cities founded on mythic souls or omphalos (navel). Even hunter gatherer groups built tombs because the soul, which exists at death, needs a place to continue living. The womb-like tomb, and animal burial rites, yield to tree-huts and elevated burial pyres, with both now being supported on poles ceremoniously or decoratively carved with skull or mouth (at the top), neck, trunk, hand, arm and leg; the foot itself serving as the measure of man’s creation (noting, however, that for all the power of the sexual impulse, man aspires to be independent of nature such that there are comparably few unequivocal sexual representations when considering all the craft pottery and other building materials that go into a temple or home). Nature is imitated to a certain degree, after-which, natural materials are self-creatively used, as with the case of fire in many traditions of which the Greek Prometheus saga is the best known; man is said to steal fire from heaven. This means that he arrogantly assumed the power of generating it, just as he finally ceased to accept sexuality as a gift of nature and took it upon himself the role of a god who creates men. The culmination of this self-creative architecture is the classic Greek temple succeeding as the ultimate human expression of self-reflective recognition regarding their supreme achievement. The chthonian nature is banished to the underworld, and the gods are separated from man’s earthly business in the heavens above. “We shall return to the problem of how much denial of man’s own nature was involved in this human urge to create - in any case it produced its highest achievements before man began to feel doubts about it and to be driven, by a sense of guilt at his own presumption, to return to nature and imitation of nature.” “In Classical art, as we have particularly observed in connection with Greek templebuilding, man holds a harmonious intermediate position. He has arrived at creating his own microcosmic world and also the earthly heaven - the temple - in his own image! But he still has to support the heaven above him. He is an Atlas, beginning to groan under the weight of this macrocosmic burden, as the Greek hero suffered through 38 Figure 6.2: Bull-Shaped Coffins From Bali 39 Figure 6.3: 40 Figure 6.4: 41 his godlikeness, and at the summit of his creative elevation—the Greek hybris—his consciousness of guilt throws him back into the inferior human role. This explains the trend towards imitation which later students of æsthetic have thought to detect in the Greek art-ideology; it betokens something like a rueful return to nature after too arrogantly rising above her, a self-imposed limitation on the individual presumption of creator. The imitation theory is, therefore (like every other æsthetic, for that matter), in itself an ideology arising out of the cultural situation, and not an explanation of the artistic style. Such a conception of nature - imitation as is represented by the Classical æsthetic is, to me, the expression of an abnegation of man’s own creative force, caused by a sense of guilt in creation which forces man’s return to the recognition of a higher creative force of which he himself is simply a creature, and even a mere tool of reproduction. This dualism of creature and creator Christianity subsequently drove to extremes in both its aspects: on the one hand, by the completeness with which its deity “became man,” and on the other, by its sublimely spiritual conception of God. “For just as the Greek temple stands for the humanization of an originally cosmic sacral structure, so the church represents its spiritualization. We cannot therefore agree with psychoanalysis in its symbolic interpretation—on biological lines—of the church as nothing but a sheltering cavity which replaces the mother’s womb.” Cathedrals spiritualize the classical, self-creative accomplishment of the Greek macrocosmic temple. They primarily aspire to the heavens while also carrying, in microcosm, the human element that retreats from Greek hubris. The Tower of Babel story similarly records these macro and microcosmic inclinations identifying a place as the center of the human universe, employing seven levels in correspondence with the seven vertebrae that support a human skull, and ending with condemnation for the desire of wanting to reach so high. The Church likewise celebrates the head in purely spiritual terms in which the Logos has replaced the Pneuma, although both originally come from the mouth. Christ himself is elevated on a tree or pole, who dies on the stake and yet lives by it forever and, as the vanquisher of the dragon of the underworld, passes out beyond chthonian rebirth and grows up into the spiritual heights of heaven. Much of the pre-animistic body-symbolism is retained, but in cathedrals it seems to have been reworked, or at any rate reinterpreted, in terms of the super world. This is not to say that the chthonian motifs that continue to recur are a sign of unconquered primitiveness. ”True, man never gets away from his animal nature—neither desires nor should desire to do so—but the starting point of all the problems, whether religious, artistic, or scientific, lies beyond this self-evident statement; it begins with the question: what is the attitude taken by the culture of the day or the individual vessel thereof towards this prime phenomenon of humanness? “But if the church portal, through which the worshipper enters into a higher world of supernatural existence, represents the mouth, the old chthonian idea of the underworld’s jaws, expressed in symbols of terrifying and dangerous animals (stylized devils’ grimaces and dragons’ maws), comes out as mere ornamentation of the fa ¸c ade or, it may be, the interior (choir stalls) and is robbed of its alarming character by the artistic forms given to it. And, in general, in the architecture of the sacred buildings plastic art becomes the servant of the collective ideology of the age and robs the house of God of its ancient chthonian cave-character by a decorative ornament of spiritualized symbols.” In the first case it is the animal mother-body with its protective covering (warmth, fur), and in the second the upright attitude proper to man himself (the tower) that forms the natural and the ideological archetype for the structure; and correspondingly, the structure is either a utilitybuilding or a sacral building. 42 Figure 6.5: Choir-Stall (Valenciennes, Museum) Figure 6.6: Graves and Houses of the Early Bronze-Age 43 “I say “ideological” archetype because the house is, for all its corporeal symbolism, much more than a copy from nature of maternal protection: it has passed far beyond that and has become the symbol of the creative ego that has freed itself from the maternal protective covering and risen to an independence of its own.” In order to trace this path from the underground to the heavens, Rank concludes with the ancient conception of an earth-centre, the figuration of which as the earth’s “navel” expresses a humanization of the cosmos necessary for both practical and ideological purposes. In other words, everything that the earthly culture has produced in material values lies between the microcosm and the macrocosm, but was only enabled to come to fruition through ideological relationship between the two. The paradox of the art-problem lies, therefore, in the fact that the nature of the prevailing art-style can only be detected from the other cultural achievements parallel with it and in connection with their ideological traditions; while these, again, can only be derived from an understanding of the nature of art. “Before we make our brief survey of the conception of the navel as earth-centre, in its cultural function and, more especially, as regards Greece, we may point out that there is also a negative proof of our view of artistic creativity as a macrocosmized selfelevation. This proof is the Jewish race, which in contrast to other culturally gifted Semites of the ancient East has produced no art and, for that matter, not even a material culture, but has exhausted itself in the forming of ethical religions. Taken in a cultural-historical sense, this fact may throw just such a light on the understanding of the creative activity of other nations as the neurotic, thwarted in production, provided for that of the psychology of the productive artist. What is lacking to the Jews, besides art, seems at the first glance to be that cultural correlation of the macrocosm and the microcosm which, in its various relations and ideologies, can be traced as a culturally operative influence from the ancient East, through the Classical age, till far into the Christian Middle Ages. In the Jewish “state of God” there is no room for an earthly representative of God, such as was symbolized microcosmically by Oriental rulers, let alone for an artificial symbol of him; for, as everyone knows, no representation of him was allowed. Apart from the temple, the Jews took over from the Oriental culture nothing of its earthly splendor - and the temple was no house of God, but only the place in which his word could be heard by his children, assembled in the synagogue for the purpose. Yet the Old Testament reads like an epitome of the whole spiritual culture of the ancient East,1 although made over and interpreted in the sense of the specific Jewish mentality. Its ideology is a moral outflowing of good and bad instincts in man; these can therefore be adequately expressed in terms of law and prohibition and the corresponding conceptions of reward and punishment. As a typical example of the Jewish attitude to the mythic world-outlook native to the ancient Eastern macrocosmos, we may select the story of the Tower of Babel, which also will take us back to our more immediate theme. This familiar story (which, by the very choice of locality, points to the cultural centre of the the East, Babylon) displays an obvious defeatist attitude towards human creative power, the presumption of which is morally condemned, whereas the Greek culture reacted to its “hybris” tragically.” Rank will return to the motif of language separation later. Here he concludes with the micro, macro-cosmic symbolism of the building of the tower, which in the Bible story is ideologically rejected. This abnegation of creative will did not, however, prevent the Jews from participating in 1See especially Alfred Jeremias: Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients 44 the conceptual importance among the ancient culture nations of an earth-navel. In all the primitive symbols of a connection between individual and cosmos, the navel alone has an individual symbolic significance that, in a spiritualized form as a self-creative force, could bring forth a human worldsystem. The uterus and umbilical cord, for example, are symbols of dependence while the navel remains part of the individual as the mark of this, the original connection. It stands for both the animal origin and the selfness and independence. The navel is near the vital organs, and navel cults are built on the idea of a transfer from the soul’s immortal powers in the mother’s womb (grave) to the individual. This again repeats the theme of humanization of the creative process. If the early Eastern world-picture was oriented to the ”celestial geography,” which served as the terrestrial model, here the earth becomes humanized by the aid of the Omphalos idea. In the “Omphalos” the navel of the individual born from the womb of the mother (Earth) grows out, as it were, in the form of a building which symbolizes the body and no longer that of the mother. In temple form, this might be regarded as the “sky scraper” which crowns the earthly city center. This of course leads to violent disputes as to which city is the real center of either an empire or the world. Delphi and Branchidae vied for that honor in ancient Greece, Jerusalem and Shechem in old Judea, and thus it is today with the various capitals of our monster states. The Omphalos (center) stones are both protrusions and fissures out of which mantic power emanates and erupts. Religious sacral buildings are often found on the peak navel, and roads tend to radially extend from the center (all roads lead to Rome, in contrast to SLC where I grew up). In any case, the founding of cities also involves ritualized extension into the ground with cellar foundations that might be filled with the soul of a slain twin, or in a variety of practices Rank describes where people are walled-up in the building of the city. I didn’t really understand this custom which no one seems to have explained, and you can follow-up with Rudolph Kleinpaul’s work if you like this sort of fairy tale gruesomeness. Romulus, at least, I understand as the first of seven kings, founding a city of seven hills, the Hanukkah festival with the seven-branched candlestick figures celebrating Enoch’s initiation into the heavenly mysteries, and the world itself as a creation in seven days. The idea of a god of heaven as architect of the universe becomes intelligible: he builds the cosmos as man builds the city. Enoch the city builder is, according to Alexander Polyhistor (c. 80 B.C.), the inventor also of astrology and identical with Atlas—the uppermost, seventh, and last of a series of identically formed joints (neck-vertebrae); for he is also “the seventh from Adam”. This involves the “head cults” that Rank understands, but are too much for me to put into context. In any case, “The idea is no doubt that the mortal “double” must be sacrificed if the immortal ego is to live on in the work. Seen in this light, Cain’s fratricide, as described in the Bible, appears as the condemnation of human presumption which uses for self-glorification the life given by God. And therefore, in founding the city - which as its building-sacrifice claimed Abel in the pride of his youth - Cain does not name it after himself, but after his son Enoch, in accordance with the tribal ideology of the Jewish race.”2 “Thus we find ourselves again in touch with the primary principle, already formulated, underlying all artistic creativity, and manifested ideologically in the old Oriental culture, æsthetically in Greece, and religiously in Christianity: the creation, namely, of material and spiritual values—the values of culture, art, and religion—not as an imitation of nature, but as a macrocosmization of man, pointing him towards a new spiritual reality that is created out of himself and exists only through him. The essential in this 2For the interpretation of Cain, see my Seelenglaube und Psychologie, pp. 158 et seq. 45 Figure 6.7: Figure 6.8: Marble Omphalom from Delphi 46 process is the roundabout path that mortal man must tread through the imperishable cosmos (the constellations) in order to create out of himself on the humanized earth immortal cultural values which survive him. To this end, however, he must sacrifice part of his actual life, his possibilities of earthly happiness, creating a spiritual cosmos analogous to the heavenly one; and thus he becomes himself a maker of worlds, but, at the same time, his own world-stuff out of which and by which he creates. This, as we shall show in the next chapter, is the meaning of all mythology—that it melts human (earthly) and heavenly (cosmic) motives into an indissoluble unity. But this betokens no more and no less than that man starts from heaven to conquer the earth—a conquest that found its most perfect expression in the Greek cultural ideology with its humanized myths. Thus, man must first be the mythic creator of the cosmos, after which he becomes the creator of everything earthly—and therefore of the human culture that finds its objective expression in art.” Figure 6.9: Two Celtic Omphaloi 47 48 Chapter 7 Myth and Metaphor The world is a generalized form of the spirit, its symbolic picture Novalis “In the last two chapters we have frequently come up against mythical traditions, which not only occupy an essential position in the general culture of peoples, but constitute an important function for the artistic productions of each period of culture. The myth lays down over earlier tradition the particular cultural stratum of the present and is thus, at least in its higher forms, the best, at times the only, source for our knowledge of that present’s ideologies. The immortality-ideologies which have been discussed in previous chapters, and which lead to religious or artistic creation, find either their contemporary expression or their later interpretation in the many mythical traditions of the peoples, whether primitive or advanced to culture. These myths are all constructed on the “micro-macrocosmic” scheme within which, however, we can establish a development from the primitive macrocosmic pattern to the more advanced, microcosmic art-forms. The peculiarity of the myth in this is that—in varying degrees, it is true—it not only presents the ideology, so to say, in theoretical form, but simultaneously interprets it, so that it appears as a forerunner of the poetic art, to which it is in any case allied by its narrative form. In the myth, however, which a people tells of its heroes or saviours the hero’s creative activity appears as an activity of doing (or suffering), while the individual poet of later times finds his true creativity in the making of the story itself. But this profound difference cannot be explained only in the psychological passage from the hero to the poet, but springs from a simultaneous and parallel process which transforms the ideologically created myth into the metaphor, and this survives into modern poetry as a decorative ornament. (For the relation of the poet to the hero whose heir he is, see my book: Don Juan and the Double, and a later chapter of this book, ‘The Poetic Artist and its Hero.’) “Let us start with a coarse macrocosmic myth of pretty high antiquity, which will lead us straight into the problem of its making. In the Edda we are told that the world was made from the parts of the body of the dismembered giant Ymir: From Ymir’s flesh was the world made; 49 From the legs the mountains, and the heavens from the skull Of the icy giant, and from his sweat the sea. VAFTHRUDISMAL With this introduction, Rank begins a chapter of mythic proportions, but manageable by his focus on creative urge and personality development. He knows the literature, and his summary of the colorful symbolizations must unfortunately be further condensed in this essay. The dismemberment theme of the giant Ymir, for example, is duplicated in the hymn of the Rigveda where the dismembered body of Purushu has a foot touching the earth and a head that is in the heavens. His dismemberment, however, includes a cultural development, in regard to a humanization of the earth and heavens, deserving of a new term regarding creativity itself, Schopenhauer’s “makanthropos”, which is also applicable to the version of the Creation in the Vedas themselves. Primal creation gives way to self-creative macrocosmic projection, whose parallel in microcosmic stories includes the wide-spread World Egg doctrine which are creation stories closer to human growth patterns. A later Brahminic doctrine, at any rate, shows a rude theory of creation transformed into a religious explanation of sacrifice, which strikes Rank as quite Christian. Renewal and reconstitution is a recurring theme where the creative self-sacrifice of the God brings us back to the original problem. Why does man create creation myths in self-creative ways? Figure 7.1: Separation of Heaven from Earth (Ancient Egypt) “The question may remain open whether the primal creation occurred as a result of self-sacrifice or of being sacrificed and dismembered; all we need now is to emphasize that idea which is common to all these versions of creation and which we met with in the building-sacrifice—namely, that the construction of the world also, apparently, demands a living sacrifice, and later traditions, which survive right into our nursery and drawing-room games, will show that not only mythical battles and games-contests but real wars have at bottom turned on the question of who the sacrificial officiator is to be. At any rate these Indo-Germanic versions of the Creation show that we are dealing with makanthropic phenomenon which makes man, actively or passively, into the creator of the world. These myths therefore show us not only the first, but the most gigantesque type of artist, who creates the world not so much in his own image as from out of himself. But having regard to the most primitive immortality-ideology already discussed, I should like to maintain that the sacrificing of man for the creation of the world has its origin in the same feeling of imperishableness, and that the becoming 50 a victim, as it still survives in Christianity, is only a voluntary acceptance of this interconnexion of dying, decay, and resurrection. Naturally men try to divert this selfsacrifice on to others or to represent it as punishment; but the basic question is how men ever came to the idea, which rejects sexual generation in favour of the belief in metamorphosis and thus makes of death only a change of form.” Myths concerning the origin of the hero, in contrast, which follow a pattern of being born of the mother, exposed by the father, and nourished and protected by the animal, are a subsequent development which are, “. . . universal myths representing the struggle of the rising father-ideology—which implies that of sexual immortality—not only with the older matrilinear organization of the family, but also with the self-creative tendencies of the individual, who, as hero, not only denies descent from the father but attempts to make himself independent of the mother.” The hero’s unique origin is also developed as a struggle. This brings us to the water-bearing myths where Rank again relies on Frobenius’ studies in Oceania. Here, in what Frobenius calls “world-parent myths”, the hero rises from the role of creature to that of creator and even selfcreator. In these myths, the young son forces asunder the united primal parents (often during intercourse) so that the father moves upwards as the heavens, and the mother remains below as the earth. A separation of heaven from earth is similarly depicted in ancient Egypt, and this conception of the heavens as father, and the earth as mother, is found all over Oceania, China, ancient India, among Semites, Greeks, and the Nordic peoples, and occurs even in America and Africa. Rank says these myths must have arisen at a comparatively late stage of cultural development because they presuppose not merely knowledge of the father’s place in pro-creation, but the acceptance of this in the social immortality-ideology (remember that in primitive societies this responsibility is denied, see (Seelenglaube und Psychologie). The classic example of the liberation of the creative individual, of the hero, from the paternal relation, expressed in the myths of the world-parents, are the “whale myths” which Frobenius collected in Oceania, but which have travelled from the old Oriental cultures into Greek mythology. The swallowing myths themselves, of which the Jonah story is a type, have the form where the hero is swallowed by a monster, he floats within the belly for some time at sea, and then (in many versions) he cuts off the heart of the fish to still his hunger, lights a fire in its inside, and is finally spewed up on land or makes his own way out by ripping open its belly. Rank emphasizes the creative motive which led men to use these mythical symbols, whether as birth process or, as Frobenius interprets, solar cycle. This heroic form of rebirth seems to fuse the microcosmic and macrocosmic symbols whereby the individual is raised above the ordinary course of biological birth and assimilated to the ever-recurring heavenly bodies. In this sense, the period spent in the whale’s belly is a period in the underworld where the sun descends to be reborn. “Here, then, as everywhere in the self-creative tendency of the individual, we find the immortality-ideology which appears in the mythic form as rebirth of the self (incest) and artistically as externalization of the self (in the work).” Further discussion ensues regarding the heroic deed in the liberation from the parents that constitutes the birth of the self. Self-creation cast in symbolic terms then provides an opportunity to cast the self in terms of the very creation originally described. Heracles in the Lycophron wins Hesione by leaping down the throat of a shark, Perseus is swallowed by a sea monster and kills 51 it by way of the liver, which is regarded as the seat of life. A Babylonian Creation myth tells of the creation of the world by the youngest god, Marduk, out of Tiamat, who is conceived as the primal sea. Marduk has to destroy her before the other gods could cut her body in two, making one part the heavens and the other into the ocean, and illustrates how the macrocosmic and microcosmic symbolizations naturally occur in both heavenly results and earthly activities. Rank has never strictly followed a chronology in leading us to the next theme, and he has never strictly categorized any instance for the sake of logic. In this section, for example, while discussing if the Tiamat macrocosm is primal matter (Tia-mat, primal water) or microcosm (as mother-body) he simply repeats that the myth certainly tells of the conquest of the prime-symbol by the creative god, who later, in the Bible, “brings the earth, and all that therein is, to being by his mere word.” He observes that we are not told in the Bible story how God created man in his own image, and we only learn of man’s earthly origin after the expulsion. The creation of woman is, however, he says, as he has shown elsewhere, “. . . so barefaced an attempt to remodel the genuine content in the sense of the masculine world-picture that it can hardly be called creative; the less so as God still appears as the creator, and man is condemned to be mortal creature. For in the making of the human being (the man) from earth there persists still, it seems, the original descent from the mother; only, we have before us the antithesis to the mythic creation of the earth from man. Later traditions, arising under Christian influence, then carried this parallelism all through and made the first man appear as a complete inversion of the first creation of the world. In mediaeval legends Adam, the first man, is formed of seven substances: the body from the earth, the bones of stone, the blood of water, the hair of grass, the eyes from the sun, the breath from the wind, the thoughts from the clouds.1 . This path which man has trodden—passing from the world made out of the body, via man made from the earth (Adam), to the Christ born of the Spirit—includes the birth of the artist as well. He appears first as the sculptor of the world, making the universe macrocosmically from himself; then in due course from this actual “making” on the basis of partition and magnifying there springs a symbolic creation of form on the basis of the killing of what is living (Tiamat); and this leads finally to the pure poetic form in which a world is born from nothingness by the Word.” And here, so they say, is where the worm turns, “But the biblical creative force of the word has its origin, as we know today, in the magical significance of the Word, which has preserved for us along with the creative also the dangerous aspect of word-magic, as it survives even today in our curses. Thus the name of God may not be taken in vain by the Jews; in fact he has no real name at all, being called the Almighty, the Lord. But he reveals himself to his people in a far higher degree through the Word than ever did his Oriental predecessors, who still spoke in symbolic signs which the priest had to interpret. The Word of the Semitic god admits of no doubt; it is revealed not as a hint from heaven which may be interpreted anyhow, but as a law, all interpretation of which was originally forbidden, and the knowledge of which was kept secret like primitive word-magic. The Jews, however, were not only forbidden to take the name of God in vain, but also to make any images of him, which explains the absence of all pictorial art as well as their unalterable faith in the spoken word of the Law. They have, moreover, no cultural material, as other peoples have, and this not so much because they had no land or home for, after all, they had one, and lost 1See R. Kohler: Kleine Schriften, II, and several other references) 52 it, in Canaan but because the creative word is incapable of direct cultural development otherwise than in the direction of spiritualization with its climax in Christianity.” . . . “The world, made of organic material, may one day die, just as its mythical creator, the hero, dies; while what the spirit forms through the Word, or the Logos, is permanent and immortal. Hence, Christianity extends the Logos-creation to man, who in the Old Testament is the one and only created thing that is mortal. The rude artisan’s making of the world, whether from the body of the mother or from his own body of the divinized (magnified) ego, represents indeed only the primitive stage preceding generation by the Word or creation from the spirit. At the root of both, however, the fashioning out of material and the creating from the spirit, is the primal creative urge of the individual to raise himself from creature to creator.” This self-raising movement is also shown in the evolution of myth where early stories emphasize the body and later ones focus on the intellect which reflects a changing belief about the seat of the soul which migrates from the lower body to the head and intellect. The power of the Bible’s language, Rank says, “. . . shows itself, both in point of monumental content (absorbing into itself the whole of the higher Oriental cultures) and in point of formal significance, to be its very essence. I mean, the Bible does not merely depict the creation of the world and birth of man, but, through its expressive power, actually represents it: that is to say it is a world-creation in words, and in this fact lies its incomparable literary glory.” Myth both represents a culture’s ideology, and interprets it, and words uniquely support this self-creative expression. The operation of interpretation has the outcome of an idea or meaning, and Rank traces how words represent ideas in three different artistic accomplishments. Homer’s language, for example, famously uses simile, in not only picturesque ways but at times literally plastic. In relation to Rank’s earlier discussion of Greek sculpture, he calls this form of metaphor spatial. In contrast, the “master of modern metaphor, Marcel Proust” is temporal, and between these, Rank characterizes Shakespeare’s use of metaphor as dynamic. The primitive myth, which does not depend on the poet, is a living metaphor, and as the classical stage evolves into our modern psychology, the poet retains the meaningful idea, but uses it in simile and metaphor. Homer’s use of simile is distinct from Proust in the same way as space and time are distinct. Space is a concrete idea, and time an abstract, thus Homer’s metaphor is plastic while Proust’s is intellectual. E. Elster writes that in the epic adjectives, “Something of the splendor and glory of early days lay even in the form of language, just as the bronze shields and chariots were retained by the poetry of an age of iron and riding.” Proust’s work, likewise drawing on archaic forms, is a single gigantic metaphor (Le Temps retrouv´e). At bottom, for both, in any case, is the matter of ideas about life and death and the fear of death, or the will to maintain the actual life-process in the poet himself, rather than of a will to reconquer the past (which Rank characteristically says could only come out as a neurotic expression thereof). “This fact, characteristic of Proust’s metaphors, that they dominate not only his language but his whole work, is probably true of Homer too, and quite emphatically so of Shakespeare.” Rank speculates that perhaps the nature of William’s dynamic metaphor was not just a consequence of dramatic form, but perhaps the dynamic quality forced him to the drama. Shake53 speare does not distinguish the past and present, either spatially or temporally, for example, but piles his metaphors up until they are falling one over the other. Individual characters frequently appear as personified metaphors: thus Othello is unrestrainedly jealous, like a primitive; Shylock inhumanly avaricious like the devil of gold himself, and Hamlet represents the old immortalitybelief. These metaphorical presentations achieve a present representation by the poet’s use of an old lost ideology that still lives with its old creative vitality. “As the Word, then, in its original magical significance (which, even in the Bible, still leads to actual creation) is capable of working miracles, so the genuine poetic art, as we find it in epic, dramatic, and lyric form, has replaced the old power of creation through its capacity to revivify in metaphor the lost past of the individual or of the people, by associating it with the present by means of the art of language and of metaphor. Thus the primal creation of the world is replaced by a re-engendering of the past not only as to content but also as to form—namely, in metaphor.” Developing the metaphor in macrocosmic and microcosmic inclinations, Rank cites Carl du Prel’s work in following lyric poetry out from primitive contemplation through Classical art to modern poetry. The chief part is played by the transference of bodily attitudes, gestures, and affections to other subjects, animate or inanimate. The poet may not only speak of the “backbone” of mountains, the “bosom” of the sea, the “tongue” of a glacier, the “head” of a rock, the “jaws” of hell, but also may compare the boughs of a tree to arms, a summit to the crown of the head. This represents both a micro-humanizing of the world and a macro-enlarging of man to the proportions of the world. Anatomical terms, along with numbers, are the best preserved branch of a vocabulary. All these originally very real and vital relations, which decisively influenced the fortunes, not only of men, but of whole lands and peoples, we find later reduced to the level of metaphors—as, for instance, in Shakespeare’s famous comparisons of the state to a human organism in Coriolanus I, i, and also Julius Ceasar, II, i, where the higher faculties complain about the idle belly. The kingly-crowned head, the vigilant eye, The Counselor heart, the arm our soldier, Our steed the leg, the tongue our trumpeter, With other muniments and petty helps In this our fabric, if that they— What then? . . . Should by the cormorant belly be restrain’d, Who is the sink o’ the body. The answer of the belly is to assert with emphasis its value as the center that supplies the whole bodily economy with its nourishment. This macrocosmic symbolization of the Roman state is paralleled by microcosmic symbolism (Menenius apostrophizes one of the citizens as the big toe) that Rank says was once in the ancient world-view truly alive, and it not only contributed to the forming of myths but (as he will discuss in the next chapter) decisively influenced the formation of language. Between the primeval microcosmic symbolism and its highest artistic development in the metaphor lies the period of the myth, which itself developed as one gigantic metaphor from language. The tendency to transfer particular parts of the body to surrounding nature is richly found in all languages. A macrocosmization, on the other hand (so to speak), leads to myth coming out of language. In other words, the myths which deal with the creation of the world out of the human body are really speech-myths 54 which represent man’s conquest (that is, his creation) of the world by naming the objects (that is, by metaphorically expressing them through speech). Language has a creative power that does not merely tell the myths, but forms them physioplastically. This is, again, why bodily names and numbers are so well preserved in vocabulary. Rank cites Holma in regard to how the Assyrian language strives after concreteness in the attempt to objectify the ideology belief. Levy-Bruhl likewise establishes a general feature of concrete designations in the primitive languages. Most Semitic prepositions are really names of concrete things in the genitive case, and it is this tendency towards the concrete and objective that accounts in art for the localizing of psychological emotions and feelings in various parts of the body. The ear is the seat of attention, for example, the heart of understanding, the liver, the central organ of life, the stomach of wisdom, and the nose of pride (“turning up your nose”). The egocentric application later expands so that we have the “foot” of the mountain. And, of course, the measurements are not only named after the body but actually taken from them. A handbreadth, or the inch of a finger, very early shows that man intends to become the measure of all things, and this counting presupposes the notion of plurality. Another peculiarity of primitive language, that Rank says is due to the urge for concrete specification, is that these languages do not possess our general plural, but always try to express a definite plural. The use of words like “trial” or even “quatrial” are less grammatical numbers than plurals with definite numbers attached to each. E.O. Wilson emphasizes that counting is a genetic inclination, and Rank shows how numbers are differently used to represent particular things. Rank thinks that maybe the numbering inclination relates to parts of the body, especially the pairs, which demand the dual. This is at least true in more advanced differentiation. In any case, most primitives (and many moderns, well, me) still count with the parts of their body. The five or ten or twenty system is widespread among old culture-peoples, and by its side the two or four system plays an important part, especially among the Indians where Levy-Bruhl sees a relation to the four directions of the wind. “In fact, I should think it possible that the whole orientation of man in the world is connected with the two sides of the body (front and back), which still have an important place in all cosmologies: for instance, the earth-goddess on her back, and the god of heaven bowed over her. My purpose here, at any rate, is to emphasize the fact that higher cultural development goes pari passu with the higher development of language, and, more, that the self-creative development of language seems to be a preconditions of higher culture. One of the first and most essential steps of this higher development of language is the macrocosmization of the (already named) parts of the body that is, their transference not only to the surrounding objects of nature among which man lives and with which he comes in contact, but also to the heavens and the universe, the linguistic identification being accompanied by a psychic one, tending to assimilate man to the cosmic immortality. Primitive man, as totemism in particular teaches us, remained at a materialistic level of personal immortality, which was symbolized, as our earlier study has shown, in the animal. In the higher cultures men have to use their growing knowledge of anatomy, etc., to get away from this now intolerable idea and seek a new, super-terrestrial, macrocosmic immortality. But for this language was the precondition since the names of the parts of the body were to be transferred to the world—and this macrocosmic expansion of language was subsequently justified, proved, and, so to say, made true by the creation of myths. In this sense the creation-myths we have discussed, especially the rise of the world from the members of a giant or demigod, are only grand linguistic metaphors for this projection of the parts of the body on to the whole universe.” 55 56 Chapter 8 Speech Formation and Creation In the beginning was the word, and the word was God. John i, 3 I thought this would be an easier chapter to review because Rank cites from many sources which means he must also address their interpretations, and those don’t naturally explain creativity. He even admits in a later chapter that this is part of a, “vast detour through humanity’s macrocosmic world picture—” In this chapter, Rank relies on two other investigators, Mauthner and Bocklen (similar to his earlier use of Worringer and Reigl), to present two opposing positions that nevertheless both show agreement about the mythic form of language. Language evolves, and intimately involves, the mouth (which proceeds directly from the head), and the hand (as a tool that serves the mouth and extends the body). Words have power, and power is protected by individuals and groups, thus we return to the foundation of a relation between personal expression and collective understanding both between the individual and the group, and the group with other groups (including animals). Language is the poetic artist’s material. We don’t know how language originated, and Rank won’t claim to know, but he does address evolution of language in primitive cultures, cultural grammar, and mythical stories. He relies on others to address the nature of language; Fritz Mauthner is the bohemian student whose writings inform Rank that language is inefficient as an epistemological tool because its essence is mythological and not logical. Bocklen says that all language originates in metaphor about the moon. Imitating cosmic bodies in human processes naturally links to the earlier chapters, and it is not difficult to agree that language is not all onomatopoetic and imitative function; that we use it just because we want others to understand us. The two authors with opposing viewpoints allow Rank to make his point that, given their agreement about mythic form, language and the formation of speech are one,“vast metaphorical comprehension of the world.” Rank admits that even Mauthner was influenced in his critique of linguistic intellectual values by Hamann, Herder, Humboldt and Jacobi.1 1 It’s rare to have an author reference Hamann, and I wish I knew more if Rank read his work. The Magus im Norden is a master of language. Ted Kinnaman writes, “A chief philosophical significance of the Æsthetica in nuce is that Hamann here deepens his conception of the connection between artistic genius, nature, and God. Nature, he says, is, “a speech through creation to creation.” 57 There is also a philosophical position for language, first found in Greece, according to the neo-Platonist Proclus, that defines names as, for Heraclitus, pictures of Being. Democritus likewise called names, “sounding pictures” made by the gods, and, according to the Cratylus of Plato, a name is an imitation of a thing through the medium of the voice; moreover, it is the“essence” of a thing that is imitated in letters and syllables. Modern theory of course agrees in rejecting the purely onomatopoetic in favor of the mimetic. The real question is why man adopted just these methods of imitation. Rank appreciates Bocklen because he emphasizes the creative in trying to show that the creators weren’t simply trying to imitate any earthly sound. They wanted to howl at the moon, which, besides being a worthy immortality object, obviously has some creativity behind the whole enterprise. Whether or not there is a “primitive” language, we can see how every child has both a personal language and a desire to be understood. The primitive artist, likewise, begins by trying to creatively express in concrete terms an understanding of the collective soul belief. A first form of art is the ornamental body art, for example, a personal expression using collective symbols. There is, in language, this same quality of inner speech, and hence language is not originally or necessarily intended for understanding. Elsewhere, Rank (or maybe Becker) has written that we cannot understand the inner world of the child just because we once were a child. We do, however, still retain or reserve the right to a personal language in our own thoughts. Kierkegaard jokes that we don’t utilize the one true freedom we have—freedom of thought, but insist on freedom of speech in compensation; an aphorism perhaps pointing to the fact that the desire to communicate a personal insight may not be collectively invited or welcome. In any case, at this point Rank makes a brief statement that made the whole chapter more difficult for me to manage by introducing this interesting idea—the profanation of language. “As regards the peculiar property of the individual, for the attainment of personal immortality in the unio mystica, there is a risk of profanation in everyday use because the sacred creative force [of word-magic] may be lost.” Before exploring further the role of word-magic and creation, Rank takes a quick (well, quick for him) detour to discuss whether language and speech formation should be seen in a sexual context where sounds are intended to mirror some kind of biological (i.e., Freudian) release of physical tension. He concludes that sounds of sexual release are one case in a larger study. The gender identification in language that might otherwise support this idea, he concludes, is more of a classification scheme, similar to the movement of the soul from the lower part of the body to the upper, than a representation of biological function. Rank quotes from John Wesley Powell’s Evolution of Language, “The student must entirely free his mind of the idea that gender is simply a distinction of sex. In Indian tongues, genders are usually methods of classification primarily into animate and inanimate. The animate may be again divided into male and female, but this is rarely the case. The main principle of classification is to divide animate from inanimate.” In the Semitic languages, for example, there is a classification of higher and lower beings that eventually become male and female. Opposed to the two-gender system of Semitic and Hamitic 58 languages and the three-gender system of the Indo-European, we have the Indian classification chiefly based on the distinction of “soul” and “no-soul” (living and non-living). There is a certain valuation that is later carried-over to masculine and feminine. The Hamitic Ful, for example, has a system of: person, things, big, and small where the “big” things pass into the class of persons, and the small into that of things, a twofold system that corresponds to our division of masculine and feminine. These valuations of big important things being associated with man, and small unimportant things with woman is parallel to the totemistic system which does not stop with the prohibitions regarding certain women (exogamy) or animals (totem), but assigns values to everything in the world by division into good and bad. Rank repeats his opinion that the woman falls into the category of evil, dangerous and less valuable through man’s urge to externalize himself personally, “. . . an urge which is threatened by sexual propagation, of which woman is the representative; and so woman passes into what I have called the Not-I class, which includes dangerous as well as unimportant (and neutral) things.” In consideration of the biological, Rank finds that the mouth and sound gestures play a more important role than the sex organs. Hence, it is our modern approach to try and bring sexual connotations into everything rather than examining the creative root force. With the word, the creative act immediately proceeds from the head with the mouth, and the role of the mouth as an instrument of speech is closely tied with gestures and the instrument of the artist’s hand. The individual at first “physioplastically” expresses interest in the life sustaining functions (e.g., nourishment and waste) that later have the character of sounds. The hand plays a significant role in in this function not only by its infantile use but also in its ability to gesture beyond the body. We can see how the hand, as a tool, extends the body into nature by throwing stones, balancing the upright gait, and of course painting and sculpting. With the poet, the origin that may creatively begin in the speech proceeding from the mouth later reverts to the hand in writing. Spoken words likewise seem to be influenced by the hand in a language of gesture and expressive movements. Much of naming, and probably all verbal description of activity derives from the sphere of the hand. The Klamath tribe, for example, may be taken as representative of a very widespread family of languages in North America, and they obey a very definite tendency which Gatschet (The Klamath Language, p. 460) calls pictorial—that is, the need to speak concretely, in pictures, to draw or paint what one wants to express. In an important work on “Manual Concepts” F. H. Cushing has also pointed to the connections of the speech expressed by movements of the hand with the oral languages. Observers of primitive man continually emphasize the part played by signs not only as a means of understanding apart from sound-language, but as an actual part of that sound-language. Rank borders on the comic with what we might recognize in stereotyping this talking-withthe-hands. “This is true, however, not only of primitive peoples, but of, to a greater or less extent, our own cultural area—Semites and Southerners—because the language of gesture is not merely an auxiliary of speech but a language of its own, which may have preceded the formation of syllables and certainly developed along with it.”2 Shaking the head to say ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ “thumbing” a ride, or singing “Stop! In the name of love,” etc. all confirm this idea of a relation between speech and gesture. Rank also goes further 2Carl Sittl: Die Gebiirdw der Griechw und Romer (Leipzig, 1890) 59 than the sexual connotations to speculate on the role the hand plays in bringing food to the mouth. The hand not only grasps the outer world in domination, but aids in consuming and incorporating it. “This originally possessive character of language is still very clear in the Melanesian and Micronesian group of languages. All parts of one’s own body and all that concerns it such as eating and the like, are defined by a suffix which, like our possessive pronoun, expresses the fact of “belonging” to our ego.”3 Levy-Bruhl similarly notices that North American languages do not distinguish the hand, arm, eye or other parts of the body but, “. . . are always associated with a pronoun, added to or included in them and indicating my eye, thy hand, his hand.”4 Dr. Peschuel-Loesche says of Loango,5 “Everyone manipulates the language in his own way; it might be truer to say that each man’s mouth utters language according to the circumstances and mood he is in. A language of this sort—I cannot find any better comparison than this rather unlovely one—is as free and natural as the utterances of animals, which are equally understood.” Levy-Bruhl says to the same effect that, “. . . words are not something rigid and fixed once for all; vocal gesture is, like that of the hand, a description, a drawing, a vivid expression of the action or object in question. In the Ronga language there is a genus of words which the writers of Bantu grammars call in general interjections or onomatopoetics. These are vocables, mostly of one syllable, by which the natives express a sudden immediate impression that has been called forth by a play, a tone, or an idea or by which they describe a movement, an appearance, a noise. They succeed in this way in giving shades of meaning which a quieter speech could not express. In addition, these little words have given rise to numerous verbs and would deserve mention even if only on that account.”6 Rank summarizes, “Here we have an example of a collective everyday language, which is universally understood, actually growing out of that individual “spoken gesture” of which the forceful originality still rings out in the language of high poesy (”poetic licence,” as we say).” Children begin with a personal and subjective language in contrast to the discounted theory that language only serves collective communication. In this sense the individual sound-formation corresponds more or less to an incorporation of the indicated objects by the mouth, while the collectivizing of language serves as a medium of understanding which is more like a giving-out, or throwing-out of what has been previously taken in. 3Parkinson: Thirty Years in the South Seas, p. 730 4Levy-Bruhl, op. Cit., p. 143 5Die Loango Expedition, III, 2, pp. 91-5 6Junod: Grammaire Ronga p. 197 60 “I was able to show the therapeutic character of the giving-out effect of this “expression,” which is also the basic element of confession.”7 Language thus has a double character as a subjective means of expression and a collective medium of understanding, and this occurs in all language as well as being close to his idea of art as both personal and collective. Indeed, this centers the chapter on one of Rank’s most enduring themes; the relation of an individual to the society. Myths creatively express this in the sacrifice of man for the construction of the universe, and there are other myths specifically concerned with a conflict between the individual and collective use of language. These myths do not deal with the origin of language as much as the difference of language where we can see the Tower of Babel as the classic example. But, there are other myths where language is completely lost as the penalty of some sin. There is both a loss of collective intelligibility and a sense of individual resistance to the collective that Rank believes comes from the universal conflict between individual surrender of autonomy for collective benefit. Among these is the magical creative (or destructive) use of language which is kept secret in order to maintain its efficacy. “This struggle to win a language of one’s own, which every child to this day passes through, can be traced in discourse from the peculiar elevated language of prayer and poetry, via the secret language of sect and profession, right into the specific language of a people or a nation.” People pursuing their national immortality-ideologies seek to retain the special qualities of their mother tongue and reject a world-language. Other languages represent an unwanted individualization, in the same way that an individual who might have odd speaking habits is ostracized if those sounds are of no use to the community. It is only when an individual is capable of helping the community by his individual creation of words, as the magician helps the primitive, the priest the higher culture, and the poet his own culture, that a curiosity of speech is freed from the suspicion of personal misuse and becomes generally accessible. “As far as ideologies are concerned, this over-valuation of language not only is justified, but leads to an intoxication of words, which is akin to that of creativity, and which is seen also in the mystic ecstasy of prayer or the pathological condition of extreme polyglot. In fact, do not the ideologies, which include at an early stage the belief in a soul and later the macro- cosmic immortality-myths, owe their existence to the word and are they not made possible only by language? For language was not only the first physioplastic creation of man, but his first self-creative achievement in a truly artistic sense. All other creativity was, if not imitation in the naturalistic sense, at any rate a deliberate follow-up of something already existent for the purpose of controlling it. But in language man made some- thing new which had creative force in itself, and it was this something that in fact transformed the world in a human sense. And not only that, but it brought forth a new world, that of ideology. Language, however, was not only the beginning of artistic creation, but has been its highest peak; for it had not during its career to pass through the stages from the belly—to the head-culture, but appeared instantaneously as one of the earliest achievements of the latter, which thereafter was enabled by it, and it alone, to become a genuinely spiritual culture.” 7Technik tier Psychoanalyse Vol. III, 1931 (p. 95) 61 The role of ideology obviously dominates as a theme, but Rank extends his consideration of eating and speech development in the mythic sense. Citing Bocklen’s study of Indians and Australians, Rank considers cannibalism in terms of the ego and power acquisition of another. Cannibalism was never about nourishment, “. . . but rather something esoteric in the nature of unio mystica—that is, the appropriation of the other’s soul for the strengthening of one’s own ego.” There is a danger in consuming the dead to appropriate their life, and in many stories it leads to the complete loss of speech. This is connected to the silence of the dead, where a worry might arise that, in consuming the dead, one might also acquire qualities of being dead. But this identification with the dead is more than a punishment; it represents the entry into immortality: in death all have once more the same language. This is probably the meaning of a myth of the Navajos, “who had all spoken the same language under the earth, but when they came above ground each into his own dwelling, had soon so many dialects that hardly anyone could understand anyone else.” In an Australian myth, however, dismemberment plays the role of bringing the discovery of language with the eating of human flesh. ”An old woman called Wururi, who went out in the night with a big stick and extinguished the fire, had died and the peoples were devouring the corpse. The southern races came first and ate the flesh, and thus obtained a clear language; the eastern races came second and ate the upper entrails and spoke somewhat differently (presumably less clearly), and for the northern there was nothing left but the intestines, and their talk was still more different.”8 Rank points out that, “In this case, it is the corpse of a woman that died, while in the other traditions of the Iroquois and Dog-rib Indians the confusion of language follows on the eating of a man who has been killed like an animal. This draws our attention to the fact that the distinction may really be between violent and natural death, and not between man and animal; for in general animals are identified with or even placed above men. Even in our own stories and fables animals talk; and primitive man had many more scruples than we have about killing and eating them.” He only can speculate, but the Paleolithic drawings and early reincarnation ideas plausibly are signs that primitive man closely identified with the animals. In this regard, the magic words and pictures are not so much charms for luck in the hunt as charms for protection against bad luck that might follow from the killing. There are numerous stories about the hunter asking permission from the prey to kill and eat it. If the animal refused permission, then the act might be a murder to be avenged on the murderer. In a myth of the Californian Indians, the Luiseno, for example, on the occasion of a debate about whether men may die and live again, attention was sidetracked by a question about whether a stag in attendance would be good to eat. 8Steinthal: Geschichte tier Sprachwimnschajt, p.9 62 “They talked about it with the stag, but he replied: No, he was a shaman and very powerful.” The story then describes how the stag was saved from being killed by the fact that he possessed himself all the magic by which men threatened to kill him, and was therefore even in this respect identical with men. It was not until he was shown a flint arrow that he gave in; here was something magic which he did not possess. “In any case, with this materialistic metamorphosis idea we have the paradox that in eating an animal man was in danger of eating his kin, which is not so in the case of a human enemy. Without entering into all the numerous and strange customs which result from this view, we will point out that this most primitive immortality-idea found expression also in the earliest form of artistic production.” Rank concludes with a discussion of a hunt motif which Frobenius found in various parts of Africa. This is a line broken in many places which passes from a man, depicted in a hunting process, to the lower part of the body of a woman who is apparently praying. I’m not sure I can agree with the interpretation that the woman is a vessel of immortality praying for the hunter’s protection as another immortal vessel facing the sacred bird as a bearer of a human soul, so I will reproduce the picture and let you enjoy it. (What do you see that supports his idea that there is a soul in the woman, the man and the ostrich?) This will allow me to conclude with what has become a routine—completely quoting the final paragraph: Figure 8.1: Rock Drawing from Tint in Algeria “This last example reminds us once again of the opposition between the mortal dependence on the mother and the continued existence of the human soul in the animal, which had its origin in the soul-worm. And the same fundamental antithesis holds also 63 for the development of language in the narrower sense, since the child learns the use of sounds, for purposes of understanding, in the first place from the mother and in relation to her (do we not say“mother” tongue?). But along with it the originally subjective function of language as a means of personal expression survives, and this perhaps explains why, in myth, man learns the language of expression from the animals, which use sounds less for intelligibility than for the discharge of inner tensions. The privileged role of the bird is probably less closely connected with its sex-call than with its soulsignificance it has both for nature-peoples like Indians and Australians and even for ourselves (the stork, etc.). For the soul-language which man makes within himself to express his feelings is and remains something other than the mother tongue which he uses for practical communication. In the higher forms of language, such as prayer, spell, song, and finally poetry, a more or less harmonious combination of expression and communication is achieved, though here too the really creative part lies in the personal expression, while the artistic achievement consists in putting this into generally intelligible form.” 64 Chapter 9 The Poetic Art and Its Hero I raised myself to be a singer and made myself to be a speaker of magic. Kalevala Back to the classic Otto Rank. This theme of the “heroic” poet was one I remembered from my first reading of AaA. “The purely creative side of poetry, as we have found from our study of speech, is concerned chiefly with that subjective expressive capacity which we have called the language of the soul. By this we understood, in contrast to the mother tongue which serves as a medium of communication, the self-creative function of sound-forming which serves as an expression of inner processes, their pictorial shaping in word and sentence. Before we follow the development of this originally physioplastic faculty into the ideoplastic expression-art of the poet and its guage, we will illustrate the ideological character of language-creation from the example of the soul-concept itself. There is no doubt that the soul, this thing abstract in itself, was once breath, which was always associated with the mouth, which is also he source of language.” The breath-soul, our spiration, uniquely represents our soul and represents the first projection of soul onto nature along with the abstract concept that a soul can survive the body. Language is therefore both creatively used and is itself creative. This dual character of language is made explicit as ideal unconscious forms and conscious analytics in opposing theories, “whose champions stretch in sequence from Plato and Aristotle right up to Freud and his opponents.” “The two historical phases of language-creation, as we have found them in the individual copying and mastering of an ideological force and then in the surrender of this word-magic for the sake of general understanding, are thus still at work in the poet, even if no longer in their historical order.” The will to immortality, beginning with the primitive magic, gradually is lost to the hero who acts on his dreams in trying to make it real, as it also happens with his successor, the singer 65 or poet, who tries to recover the act in words and drama. Both ironically achieve, in failed deeds and limited work, a sort of individual immortality in the collective ideology. “The fundamental idea is that for all created things there is needed not a creator, but a piece of life, life itself, which is somehow withdrawn from its proper destiny of death and fixed in an intransient existence.” The dual nature of language, as individually creative and collectively communicated, allows man to express the soul concept religiously, then heroically, and finally artistically. The hero and the artist’s willing self-sacrifice points to one of the most complex interplays in the way this reciprocal action between the individual and the collective, which is inherent in language, comes out in poetic creation. Breath is a symbol of life, and the breath that moves nature, a feather, for example, is still a test for death. Wind is a projection of that life force onto nature. A number of onomatopoetic sounds (spirae, su) depict the breath that is also projected in this first cultural advance where it is imagined that the wind itself has a soul. The Egyptians represent this deliberate feature of the breath as an ostrich feather. Indian Yoga, likewise, centers meditation on a holy syllable Om, and the Upanishad passages have letters of the text under the protection of certain gods, showing how they are to be pronounced in order to give proper expression to the being of the gods. “All vowels are embodiments of Indra, all sibilants and aspirates of Prajapati, all mutes of Mrtjus (Death).”1 The cabbalist Abraham Samuel Abulafia describes pronunciation in the Tetragrammaton for the mystical union with God in this way: “The many-lettered name of God is to be spoken not only with certain modulations of the voice by pauses, long or short, but with energetic movements and bowing of the body. This leads to an ecstasy from which one sinks exhausted into a sleep, wherein there comes over one a feeling as though the soul were separating from the body. The universal spirit then unites itself with the upward-striving soul in a kiss and streams over it. At this moment man receives his highest revelation.”2 This ecstatic condition is also found with the Christian speaking in tongues, and the fasting ceremonies of primitive peoples, for example the American Indians, who seek a union with powerful spirits in their deprivation of food and shelter. Rank makes a rough presentation of the Maoris’ words that describe different kinds of life-principles. We similarly have inherited the sense that animus means a thing that has a soul; as our animals do, and even in cartoon animation. J. Bohme concludes for the Homeric epic that the idea of the soul corresponds in essence with that of primitive peoples, there being in both a dualistic idea in which dead spirit and life-soul are separate ideas which only later came to be united in a single concept of the soul, the Psyche. “Whether the breath-soul was the original of all these ideas or not, it certainly holds a special position among them, since it alone has led to our modern idea of the soul, which unites the soul of the living and of the dead in one—that is, has developed 1Cahndoja Upanishad, I, 22, 3-5 2Art. “Kabbala” in Protestantischen Realenzklopadie, third edition, IX, 682 66 the spiritual significance to its utmost without wholly disregarding the bodily. This development, which is important for our whole Western culture, was accomplished in Greece and can still be traced out from the Homeric soul-concept via the popular beliefs into the purely philosophical conception of Plato.” . . . “What interests us particularly in this connection is not so much the corporeal origin of the soul (in that it was identified with a physical life-principle and placed in an organ vital to life) as the development of the purely spiritual idea which led beyond the concrete bodily nomenclature to something abstract which was to survive the body. This process too is perhaps intelligible as an anthropometric projection of the body-soul into the universe or at least the Beyond. Certainly it was made possible only be language and through its formulation. In fact, my belief is not that the need to express the abstract idea of soul developed and enriched language, but that the selfcreative tendency innate in language led to the idea of the soul. Of this assumption, which all my work supports, I find an additional and supporting proof in the language of Homer, which not only displays the development of the oldest idea of the soul among the Greeks, but itself assisted the idea to develop from its original corporeality to a higher spiritulality.” Language is both a creation and is itself creative. Man creates himself in naming his members, and extends this creation to the cosmos. “Creation by the Word is attributed to the God of the higher cultures of the Eastas in the prayers to the Babylonian Marduk, even more in those to the Egyptian Toth, who calls gods into existence by his words (Already in the Rig Veda we have the gods Indra and Agni springing from the mouth of the giant, Purusha), and of whom an inscription at the Chansu-pylon in Karnak says: “What flows from his mouth happens, and what he speaks becomes.” It was obvious then to assume that the god used his own name as the mightiest creative word -like the Egyptian Khepera (creator), who says: “I uttered my own name as a word of power from my own mouth, and forthwith I created myself.”3 This Logos doctrine of the East then passed by way of Judaism into the New Testament and received its purest expression in the John Gospel. Later Judaism sought to explain the word-creation of Genesis, and the Talmudists knew exactly by what letters or combination of letters Jawhe had created the world. “Thus it is really the formation and creation of language that has produced the religions of civilized peoples, since here, even more than in myth, it is a matter of purely ideal elements, which of course only verbal expression can objectivize. In this sense it might be truly said that words are gods, for gods are nothing but words. This creative power of the word has never received grander expression than in the Old Testament account of the Creation, which, as we have already seen, is not a mere presentation of the story, but itself a creation through the word.” The word represents the essence of God as esse and posse. It also represents a hypostasis of God where, to use it, means to come into association with it and the being and power of his omnipotence. 3Herbert Baynes: History of the Logos, J. Royal Asiatic Soc., 1906 67 “Language is, then, not only an individual artistic creation which copies some element of some ideology (and, by objectifying it, dominates it), but is probably the prime form of all artistic activity, which urges us to speak.” . . . “Two peculiarities of the artistic creation of language, which are particularly manifested in the poet, are thus satisfactorily explained by the dual character of language a an individual creation and a collective medium of communication. The one is the much-discussed question of the relative shares of the conscious and of the unconscious in poetic creation, which has often been dealt with by poets and æsthetic philosophers and which psycho-analysts have tried to solve in terms of the *content* of poetry, and of course in favour of the unconscious.” Here again we find the central theme of a relation between an individual and the society. The poet grasps at an individual word-formation in his personal language, but also inherits collective forms of rhythm, rhyme, and other received rules by poetry ideologies. The process divides more or less into two separate phases, which have been called the conscious and the unconscious. Rank sees them as the individual creative expression of an experience, and the collective communication of it. The immediate and direct experience relates to the forming of an expression that the poet grasps at by way of the cultural representations. The second, conscious phase, is the poetic production, a constructive process, or mastery, settlement and communication of the experience. These are the two theories handed-down by Plato and Aristotle. For Plato, the poet is an instrument of the divine; his faculty is purely instinctive and unconscious. Plato’s own artistically creative psychology passes into his theory of genius where, in the Phaedrus, he deduces not only poetry but philosophy also, the urge to wisdom, from a condition of unconsciousness and mania—where the highest gifts are imparted to man. In the Laws, Plato says that the poet, when he seats himself on the tripod of the Muses, “is not in his senses, but, like a fountain, lets flow what comes to him, and often contradicts himself without knowing whether the one or the other thing that he says is the truth.” In the Ion, in which philosopher and artist are contrasted, the activity of the divine is only made effective through the elimination of the reason. In the Timaeus, there is a further reference to a separation of the function of seer from that of poet and prophet, who are regarded as interpreters, orderers, and critics. Paul too, does not underestimate the power of divine inspiration, but he says, “He that speaketh in tongues edifieth only himself, but he that prophesieth edifieth the church.”4 Paul thus distinguishes between the Pneuma or breath from above and the Nous, which can interpret what is given. “Here is the original creative power of the Word, as it triumphed in the Old Testament over all lower forms of artistic creation becomes the conscious control of the daemonic force of language by the Logos: in a word, the change of language from an artistic creation into a conscious medium of communication.” Aristotle, however, Rank says, already did not recognize the primal divine force as the essence of artistic creation. His dualistic counterpoint, which Voegelin might deny, is Aristotelian reason as the basis of all giftedness. The Poetics in any case obviously have much to do with laws and its rules becoming fossil formulae. Rank sees Plato’s doctrine resurrected in the Renaissance religion of genius, and likewise Aristotle’s theory of art is championed in the 18th Century. The 4 I Cor xiv, 4 68 two don’t combine, and Rank discusses this further in Kunstler and Inzest-Motiv. This side of the unconscious, with the increasing extension of consciousness, is emphasized, and it sets the stage for the final problem here.”5 Greek poetry may have had a more collective nature than all later poetic arts. This seems to be one of the reasons why Plato regarded the poet as a channel for divine speech, and why Aristotle in his turn believed that from Greek poetry he could deduce laws that should be valid for all poetry. There is a good deal of geometry in Homer, for example. Even in modern art there is an ordering of chaos because form has to be and will always be abstract. The personal, individual elements, however, are not neglected. “This brings us back to the problem of language, since language represents not only the material in which the poet works but also the form in which he works. In other words, the poet receives his material ready formed, at least as raw material, and has only to give it a second definitive form. But this process, as we have seen, cannot be simply split into two phases, since in each of the two phases the individual and the collective elements both mingle and oppose each other. It seems to me to be one of the most complex of all psychological problems to decide in what way this reciprocal action between the individual and the collective, which is inherent in language, comes out in poetic creation; but, in conformity with our earlier discussion, we may suppose the process to be somewhat as follows: In an individual who reacts in language, a personal experience first of all finds its rough form in the traditional language-stock, which is thereby permeated by the personality and individually vitalized. On the other hand, the second stage, the verbal shaping proper, is, as it seems, to me, a fresh collectivizing of what was originally expressed personally, with communication and understanding as its object. Put shortly the first would be the expression of an individual state of feeling in the collective raw material of inherited language, the second a personal infusion into this linguistic raw material, necessitated by the social urge to communication.” This is what Rank means by a, “reversal of the historical process in the individual” due to the poetically fashioned vocabulary. The poet does not have to create language, and in fact only can use his creative energy within certain limits of style. Rank finds a clear example in the Kalevela of the primitive word magic in dreams, the heroic actualization in deeds, and the poet’s part in drama. A poet, like the hero, tries to recall what was lost in that first breathless belief in the soul. The Finnish national epic is a collection of old songs at the beginning of the 19th Century by Elias Lonnrot, translated into German and republished in 1914 with notes and an epilogue by Martin Buber. In Finnish poetry, the magic runes are kept as a sacred tradition and the epic runes are publicly sung. The word is the lord of the elements (“His song can turn his enemies to stone . . . the deeps are raised up, the heights sink to valles”) whereas the magic runes must be used with literal exactitude or their force is lost. Epic runes tell a story, and magic runes make and transform. “This fusion of the imaginative and active elements, which existed separately in the old folk-songs as the magic and the epic runes and only gradually underwent slight interlinkage, not only seems to be characteristic of epic poetry in general, but confirms 5The path from Plato and Aristotle to the present day is briefly sketched in the Introduction of my Inzest-Motiv; this may be supplemented by reference to the work of Professor Scott-James: The Making of Literature (New York, 1929), The route passes by Longinus, Dante, Ben Johnson, Boileua, Lessing, Goethe, and Coleridge, then by Sainte-Veuve, Taine, and Pater to Dilthey and the modern schools of æsthetic (see also Lange-Eichenbaum). 69 the views which we have arrived at on other grounds regarding the speech-development which forms its basis. But it seems to me that the epic rune is, more than anything else, the record of the vanished power of the magic: in the same way as we showed above that Homer rather depicts a vanished world than creates one by his words in the Old Testament way. “The Finnish folk-song,” says Buber, “has to be understood through its faith in the creative power of the rune. The magic song is the document containing the power, the epic poem the record and glorification of it. In it song celebrates itself by telling of its mightand so becomes the epic of the creative word.”” In the epic, words can create and kill, but it is a tale recounted to a peaceful audience by the mighty magician. When the poet uses the word “I” instead of naming the hero he indicates a line of descent and inheritance. “It would be a fascinating besides being in fact a very necessary task to study the whole of poetry, frist form the angle of the hero and his cultural importance, secondly from the egocentric standpoint of the poet, thirdly from that of the human need of communication.”6 The primitive magical world-outlook rests on an identity of thinking and being where the hero translates his thoughts, dreams, wishes and desires into actual practice. The hero, who is tasked with actually trying to act on these visions, like Gilgamesh, tragically fails. Both are trying to achieve immortality, and the attempt gives them a sort of fame that lives on in the song of later generations. Thus the poet, the singer, is the successor for the heroic character. The creative word brings forth the mythical or legendary story, and leads to the proper action by which what has been said is carried out in deeds. The world, and man himself, is created by the word. That is why, in the culmination of drama with Shakespeare, there is a whole lot more talking than actual action. Even Greek tragedy was far more a matter of speaking than of doing, of philosophizing about action and its conditions than of action itself. Hamlet regrets that words can no longer kill. Macbeth is a hero of words and thoughts who dreams of glory and kingdoms. Both kill first with words before they are driven to use the dagger. Shakespeare’s drama represents the beginning and culmination of heroic action as opposed to dramatic narrative that is seen in the Greek tragedies of the hero discussing the heroic problem with the chorus. Together they illustrate the unique relation between the hero and the poet. In the Homeric epic, there is a dream story in the Odyssey, and a heroization in the Illiad. The hero is no longer content to describe his fancies but is compelled to transform them into action. Still, even in the bloody Illiad, the heroes do a lot more talking about what they will do than what they actually do. Achilles, like Hamlet, spends his time complaining why he can’t act instead of just acting. Rank describes this in detail in regard to the central theme where the confusions of the Tower of Babel are played out as national prejudices and motives. The mixing of dialects in Homer’s epic, he says, serves to illustrate both the lack of national unity and the revitalizing of the past in a collective sense of the Greek race. This is just as much an immortality-symbol as the mixing of the language is a collective symbol. “This brings us from the hero to the poet, who in this sense is not only a prolongation of the identity of the hero, but actually carries on his social function at a later stage of development.” 6Freud has some suggestion in this direction, see his essay: Der Dichter und das Phantasieren (1908). 70 The original narrator described his psychical experience that everyone took for truth because it rested on the magic ideology of striving for immortality where the dream experience proved the soul immortality. At a later stage the dream was transformed, or the hero attempted to transform it, into reality. Later, someone telling of the heroic deeds would bring those to life. “In this sense the poet is a mouth-hero, a liar -as he is already called in Plato but the reproach is only fair in relation to the content and not to the form which, as language, was still to a certain extent creative. This creative faculty shows the poet to be the successor of the hero himself, who in one sense had been socially creative and effective, in that he had changed ideas into realities, but in another was already a liar, or even a swindler, since he denied the descent of the deed from the word, while at a still later stage of poetry he refuses to translate his words into deeds (Hamlet).” The hero and the poet, in any case, are both telling of the lost magical world that is human will power. They abandon the animal, plant (herb) and human being (woman) symbols of the magic age and try to find it through ideological immortality in their work. They can’t find their way to personal immortality, of course, but the effort to do so, as displayed in their work, gives them a sort-of ideological immortality. This is the tragic collapse from the effort to personal immortality where the failure ironically does achieve an immortality of sorts in the collective ideology. Individual striving has this character of a life sacrifice necessary to gain immortality. “How far this is a necessary precondition of artistic production, for whose purposes life must be spent, and how far it is a more of less conscious self-sacrifice of the man to his work, is one of the deepest problems in the whole psychology of productivity. . . . The belief in immortality which man seeks, first religiously, then heroically, and finally artistically, to save passes through a development in human history which I have described in my Seegenlaube and which is also manifested in art as a whole and in poetry especially.” Drama is the final step in this conflict for in the drama man both creates life in language and the actor performs it in bodily form. The painter must necessarily deal in the abstract, as the sculptor does in the plastic arts, but the dramatist directly provides a dynamic and vivid expression for his audience. “But the prime drama of all European art was Christianity itself, at least in its significance as a new ideology of sacrifice, corresponding to the death and rebirth cycle of the ancient world. The only difference is that Christianity, out of the man sacrificed (crucified) for an idea, created the ideology of a willing self-sacrifice of one who dies for all others and precisely for that reason is himself immortalized.” Rank sees this as a rebirth of the original creation myths where the individual sacrifices, (dismembers) himself in order to produce the world from his body. This is a problem of artistic renunciation that he will deal with in the final chapter. “The fundamental idea is that for all created things there is needed not only a creator, but a piece of life, life itself, which is somehow withdrawn from its proper destiny of death and fixed in an intransient existence. The basic question, then, is: whence is this life taken which creates and gives life to the work of art? From the 71 creator, or from someone else, who offers himself as a sacrifice either voluntarily or by compulsion or through the lot falling upon him? The whole problem of artistic renunciation is contained in the acceptance and knowledge that the creator must give a part of life in fact, his own life in order to make it eternal in his work of art.” This is the same idea as the primitive sacrifice with its identification between the priest and the victim. And, it gives rise to the whole concept of a kingdom of the dead corresponding to that of the living. For the primitives, with no individual personality, one is as good as another and death gets its due. When the Oracle is sought to predict who might live, we see the first attempt by man to use his reason in trying to cheat death. We will hear more in the next chapter regarding games and destiny, but the general idea is that, as man rationally understands what he can and cannot control, he loses the original soul magic and must replace it with self-created ideology. Christianity represents a universal drama of world-history with a universal human quality of this ideology of sacrifice. Greek tragedy represents the collapse of Greek humanity with the mythic hero as the fateful individual who accepts his lot because he also willed it. In post-Christian drama the death of the hero becomes a moral warning about how to avoid fate. In the Greek drama the hero is elevated above the people who are represented by the chorus. The poet who sings and laments the hero in drama is the heir of the hero compared to the sculptor or painter who are creators like Prometheus. Modern drama thereafter embraces the passive hero the poet himself who only is guilty of rejecting his heroic role. “. . . the hero represents the poet himself as a type; and at this stage of development when the passions; when, therefore, the individual is already checked in his willed actions; once more the creative power of the word shines in all its poetic beauty, but it achieves nothing more than the momentary lightening of the poet’s heart. “This decay of the magic power of one man’s word is connected with increasing individualization, which is also reflected in the transformation of the hero and his character. In Shakesperian drama the hero no longer stands as in the Greek drama over against the chorus, which represented the whole people, nor other typical dramatis personae, but a whole series of equally individual characters, of whom each one is a hero in his own way, and in this sense speaks his own language. That all the characters in modern drama also speak the language of their poet as a collective language is not irreconcilable with this; we saw it equally in Homers epic mixture of languages which bridged the national differences of his heroes. But while, in the heroic epic which reflects the exhaustive struggles of the Migrations, we saw the poetic attempt to save the individual, in the form of national hero, from his submergence in the flood of the masses, we recognize in the tragedy which developed in the hour of the people’s victory the ruin of a hero reborn from the mass, who perishes not because of the people’s overweeningness, but his own. Tragedy shows him as freeing himself from the mass, symbolized by the chorus, only to fall a victim to the fate consequent on his own greatness. This second hero is no longer leader of the masses their head, as it were— but stands over against the crowd as an overdominant individual. The last modern struggle of this type we find in the already almost comic heavy tragedian, in whom the poet who would depict his own personal conflicts on the stage finds a mere megaphone.” 72 Chapter 10 Game and Destiny There is no chance; And what seems hazard in our eyes Arises from the deepest source. Schiller (Wallenstein) This chapter thankfully is a little easier to digest. And, the next chapter really starts to pull it all together. “It is only after this vast detour through humanity’s macrocosmic world-picture— which has shown us art as not a copy of nature, but a replica of a cosmos created on a microcosmic scale—that we can return to the problem of play: not in order to discuss æsthetic pleasure resulting from the play-impulse, but to come nearer to the comprehension of that impulse itself. Here, too, it is not sufficient to explain matters on the spiritual-collective intentions which originally led to the activity of play. Already in the æsthetic discussion of the play-impulse we have had to refer to the difference, so important for art, between the psychological attitudes of the creator and the receiver, which does not exist in games—unless it is that the defeated party in games is somehow forced into the passive role of receptivity. The pleasure experienced by the creative artist may approach the pleasure of play to this extent, that in both cases the activity is one which in the artist is at least potentially a motor activity and in play really does take effect in action. On the other hand, art as it is in the primal practice, the ritual dances and ceremonies of primitive peoples, and in point of view, an affinity to play in that, when the whole community participates, there is no rigid distinction between creative and receptive. “But as against this psychological resemblance between primitive art-activity and the play-condition we have the significant difference that the original ceremonial, even if it seems to us to be play, is for the participant something filled with the deepest and most serious meaning; in a word, that his destiny was at stake. Play has at first a very definite meanings and object, even though this is not concerned with an immediate practical purpose by (as in art) with an ideological (magical) one. When we pass from the communal customs of primitive peoples, in which every individual at least as part of a group has a definite role, to the games of higher civilizations, we find, even when they exist only for amusement and excitement, that an old idea is living on in a symbolic or 73 metaphorical form. This is, usually, the rules of the game, which are based on tradition and which the participants no longer understand, but to which, therefore, they all the more closely conform. The macrocosmic world-pictures of the older civilizations have thrown a useful light on the original cult significance of these play-ideologies and proved their connexion with the general collective world-view.” Rank believes one of the oldest games recorded in Egypt is one example that illustrates the serious concern with how games developed in terms of life and death. He also thinks this “snakegame” provides evidence of the development between an early chthonian connection with nature and later board games that represent an intellectualized and relation with nature. Most primitive games have a ceremonial character that, in the course of becoming a “game,” demonstrates how inventive intelligence and man’s independence replaced the magical manipulation of fate. Greek contests illustrate a more classical interest in symbolic national victory, and all ball games have a natural association with planetary motion in cosmic projection. The change from formal ceremony to mere game shows an intellectual urge to conquer the world and cheat nature especially of the cosmic influences which ultimately decide man’s destiny. Figure 10.1: Rank will only give a cursory sketch of the macrocosmic interactions because he is trying to bring us closer to the character of play that was introduced in an earlier chapter, but he did find a “dearth” of literature regarding these play-ideologies. (I remember one of my history professors who studied modern sports in terms of money and culture, and this is one of those hints from Rank that would have greatly benefited me if I had had the sense to choose a topic with both popular appeal and significant need.) In any case, Rank again cites Hugo Winckler for the insight about macrocosmic symbolism. 74 ”In the first, and still the best, summary of this sort, which Winckler gives us in the chapter “Myth, Legend, and Play” of his popular account of the intellectual culture of ancient Babylon, the fundamental fact is established that the festivals connected with various games had all a seasonal character, with a definite calendar as their basis. In these festivals and the associated games,“the events in heaven which the festival represents—for example, the death and rebirth of the deity, the victory over the powers of darkness, the dragon—are represented and played before the people,”1 Rank notes that most children’s games are seasonal in nature, and not only because of the weather but because they have a cosmic sense. For example, the game of Tempelhupfen has kids hopping on one foot from ‘heaven’ to ‘hell’. An original goal of victory in competition was to win life, which the defeated rival would usually forfeit. Winning is a serious goal, and gives rise to a sense of corriger la fortune in the self-preservation rules that give players a chance, and also that often include a way for the stronger player to be beaten by a trick. Tarot cards use a cabbalistic method of forecasting the future, for example, while many card games employ a trump suit that allows a lower card to beat one of higher rank in other suits. Magic alphabets also play a role, and astrological symbols abound. Many cases are omitted, but the role of astrology and the real representation of death in games of fighting and sacrifice seems clear. The symbolic threat of death is still with us even in our play, or when we ask our fortunes to be told. Rank’s examination of the early snake-game in Egypt highlights this serious concern. He relies on H.[ermann?] Ranke’s work based on a publication of James E. Quibell Excavations at Saqqara (1913). A picture taken from a wall painting shows a coiled snake cut into sections with two figures who appear to be “playing” at the board with an attendant to either side. Nearby, a small ebony box was found which belonged with the board and contained small figures of three lions and three recumbent dogs, and six times six balls of various colors. As many as six people could perhaps play. The coils of the snake remind us of the entrails in a chthonian symbolism, similar to the myths involving the labyrinth. The teeth of the snake are associated with “winning” the game, and Rank associates their after-life symbolism as body parts that decay last. In The Book of the Dead, a story is told about the divine pair of brothers, Horus and Seth, who once played together at the snake-game, either with the teeth of the snake or, as Ranke interprets it, for the teeth which he sees as a protection, as of an amulet, against the bite of the poison teeth. Teeth are sometimes knocked-out in puberty ceremonies, and teeth represent a regeneration that we can observe with our own baby teeth. These symbolic references to life and death suggest that the game was originally played with serious intent. The snake-game at least is buried as an offering for the dead, and is intended to serve the dead man in the underworld. I don’t know if it should be argued that the game was for pleasure or if it really represented an important tool for the deceased. There wasn’t clear or overwhelming evidence to me about whether the game represents a formal ceremony that is more than just a game per se, but I haven’t repeated here half of what Rank writes and he doesn’t present half of what is available in the obscure evidence. In any case, Rank uses this as an opportunity to comment on the ideology that, “. . . the gifts to the dead shows us how unreliable was the foundation on which the whole grandiose edifice of the religious immortality-ideology of the Egyptians was built (and hence how Moses, brought up as he was in the Egyptian spirit, adopted the only concretely tenable alternative when he opposed to it the earthly immortality of sexual procreation). The Egyptian, though he had immortalized himself in a lofty sun and star religion and also clung, in his earthly animal-cult and transmigration 1Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens, 1892, p. 122 75 Figure 10.2: of souls, to the pre-animistic immortality of materialism, had yet, with all this, to protect himself against decay into nothingness, against the undeniably real terror of the underworld.” The old Egyptian snake-game vanishes with the end of the Old Kingdom—before 2000 B.C.—but some texts of the New Kingdom show a modern board-game with 30 squares which the dead man plays with the snake. Ranke’s investigation notes that the older game may have been transferred to the board with square fields, and Rank goes further to wonder why Ranke doesn’t draw the obvious analogy with chess. Chess, of course, is not from Egypt, but Rank sees the same cosmic significance of a game with fateful consequences whose rules now symbolize a cultural elevation above the animal nature. The board replaces the chthonian circular form (underworld, womb) with divisions into four sections representing the compass points or seasons, or into two sides of a dueling contest like with Horus and Seth. In the home of Iranian chess, Elam, F.W. Konig has shown that the people there were organized on a matriarchal system, and therefore familiar with a powerful female divinity. Chess is therefore representative of a general change to the immortality-ideology of the father with its creative ego of which the head (the king) became the representative. The old ideology is not forgotten as the queen still holds significant power if no longer standing for the central goal. Foot soldiers naturally have a supporting role, and the other pieces represent vital supports of the state in a purely intellectualized contest. (Bishops originally were elephants, and the rook was a boat.) Games are intellectualized, Rank believes, as man develops his inventive intelligence and independence. Primitive games seem aimed at influencing nature, with particular regard to agriculture. Games like the tug-of-war are more pervasive in primitive culture, and have a ceremonial character. Others have writing that the rhythmic movements may represent a coitus, which would relate to an agricultural interest, but these ceremonies or games also are participatory. They ultimately imply a magical attempt at forecasting the future that is closer to the ceremonial sacrifice. In Sumatra, the Batak kill a bull each year and the various tribes wrestle over which way it will fall because of how that determines their fate. These contests thereby amount to “correcting fortune” in connection with a community’s destiny. The relation to agriculture is important because agriculture is a human invention (Rank’s emphasis), and agriculture presupposes both the knowledge of the human sexual process and its exploitation in nature for cattle breeding as well as for agriculture. Developments in this knowledge are reflected in games where the actual shedding of blood evolves into contests that are a sham fight. Realizing that the fruits of the field can by controlled to a considerable extent independent of nature, man may have allowed his solemn ceremonies to become games. The community participation turns to observation in duel-games that have obvious fateful significance on a personal level. At first, then, a primitive communal ceremony and magical belief provides the foundation for an important activity that is secondarily described by 76 rules. These become games as they are intellectualized by man’s independence from nature and his concern for a more individual immortality. “Man, who at first did not feel himself sure of his superior intellectual powers and yet tried to influence the unreliable weather for his own purposes, gradually realized by virtue of this same intelligence that the second was impossible and the first superfluous. Instead of real shedding of blood, which neither promotes growth nor causes rain, we have a sham fight as a sort of deception of nature, which is here the real opponent and vanquished by deceit.” This naturally relates to Rank’s theme of a classical Greek achievement in human consciousness. Rank notes that Greek contests had their highest significance and perfection with the rise of the city-state, the Polis, and decayed under the general political collapse. Roman games have even less of the character of sport and competition, and therefore chance, with their death struggle fascination. Horseracing preserves the idea of arriving home as the essence of victory. We also have games that incorporate a home base, or asylum, which depend on the arrival at a safe-spot for protection. The Indians of central Brazil still say the sun and moon are shuttlecocks (F. Borck). Ball games in general have this planetary sense with courts oriented in particular directions where the ball must pass through a particular ring or move across the field according to different rules. The double figure of the god Xolotl, who in his two forms represents players in one Central American ball game, is a patron over life and death. Xolotl is the god of twins and of the ball-game where the players are pairs. This double character Xolotl shares with almost all Mexican gods who are two contrasting halves. If the ball games return us to the primitive duel then we have retained this sense of life and death with a macrocosmic character. A primal conflict by a mythological die and become also illustrates the wishful conquest of the external world and the cosmic influences which decide man’s destiny. In the game, this is fulfilled by willing, by diverting and guiding the course of the game according to the arcane rules where the original, primitive connection to solemn ceremony may be lost. We may have lost the collective participation in tribal ceremonies, but we retain the interest to watch the contest whose outcome we cannot exactly predict. Figure 10.3: Mexico: Life and Death “As we have already shown with reference to various fertility rites, the immediate object is a cheating of nature of her tribute, for that is what death ultimately is; though he is manifested also sexually as partial death and thereafter transformed into sacrifice. 77 “Though this cheating of the original opponent has left a strong tendency to correiger la fortune in games, yet in its higher developments it represents a transition from deception to domination a raising of the cosmic phenomena from the realm of necessity into that of freedom. In this sense play is not instinct, and the games of the animals which are adduced as evidence (for instance by Groos) cannot, in my opinion be compares at all with the human games, because the motive of the original deception and the later domination of nature are entirely absent. Even children’s games cannot really be brought into evidence because the toys which children even among primitives receive are given by grown ups and thus represent an early education for the impulse and capacity for control. The first step in that control seems to be the conquest of fear, for when an Indian child is given a totem doll to play with of a negro child some primitive demon the purpose is probably to make them familiar with the object of religious faith and lose their fear of these black men. Play is thus rather a prelude to art as Freud regards it than a prelude to art as Gross thought only at a primitive stage there was no difference between the two worlds of reality and super reality so that the control of the one in play at the same time guaranteed control of the other by magic. Both however, primitive magic and later art, have the same impulse at bottom the element of control which developed of the original deception of nature. “This process of development begins in the gradual transformation of the cult or sacral festival game, with its purpose of influencing nature, into a mere sham activity with the purpose of deceiving nature. The sham manoeuvre which we call play appears to us then as the survival of a once very important and serious cult-activity, which also exhibits the increasing sphere of human influence in man’s passage from deception to control of nature: a process which seems to be repeated in children’s games, wherein we were formerly disposed to see only an occupation imposed by grown-ups, or a means to distract children, whereas in reality play is as serious for a child as cult was for primitive man. In every case play, by diminishing fear, liberates an energy which can ultimately express itself creatively. Not every child that plays becomes an artist a fact which makes play as useless for the explanation of creative art as the other infantile experiences which all children share in common. Through dominating his toys a child does gain confidence, and play does liberate stored energy, but whether it is to express itself in art or not depends on the particular use made of it. Domination may easily lead to destruction, as we see in the way that many children treat their toys; and whether this is followed by the creation of a new or the destruction another seems to depend on general conditions over which we have little control. The “young scientist” who must needs examine the inside of his toy, its mechanism and its works, by “analysis” is very early differentiated from the artist who makes himself a splendid doll out of a chip of wood. In one case, clearly, the destructive, in the other the constructive, predominates; and closer study would probably show that in the artist-type the impulse to create is subjectively attached to the ego, while the other appears to exhibit a stronger objectivity of relations.” 78 Chapter 11 Beauty and Truth Thus art moves towards its own dissolution, and in doing so most illuminatingly it touches on all the phases, its beginnings, its childhood, its incompleteness, its earlier ventures and trespasses, and in its decay interprets its growth and becoming. Nietzsche I enjoy when Rank discusses the soul. I like the soulful chapters. “From this gradual conquest of nature, which is really her successful deception by the human intelligence, we can make our way back to the individual psychological interpretation of play and the personal pleasure which pertains to it—that is, to the problem of æsthetic. The exemplar from which play proceeded certainly lacks its essential characters of freedom and pleasure. Originally play was a matter of very serious and significant ceremonies which had to be held at definite occasions if the life and wellbeing of the community were not to be endangered. Therefore at these pre-religious ceremonies neither the life nor the blood of the individual was spared to compel the favour of destiny in the community. If we contrast with this the character of the games which developed out of it, we see that their freedom amounts to a liberation from the compulsion of nature, and the attainment of pleasure to the feeling of superiority that is its outcome. We have almost to invert the usual view of the “excess”—theory of play and say that instead of play originating in excess of force, it produces this force or, more exactly, sets it free. Man sees that he need not continually sacrifice life to nature; he separates the ceremony from natural process and the idea of tribute, so that he can enjoy it freely as a triumph over nature. Play is therefore not a ceremony which has sunk to a mere show, but one which has been raised to freedom—indeed, it is only as such an expression man’s increasing dominion over nature that we can explain the change of ceremony into play; so far from being meaningless or interpretable only as a survival, the activity thereby acquired a higher sense. On the other hand, our ex79 planation also makes intelligible the pleasure which the individual gets from this sham activity, in that we regard this as a saving of vitality and, indeed, of life. “Here obviously lies also the origin of art, which, for all that it is supposed to be derived from an “art for art’s sake” attitude, in reality, as we have seen, from the beginning subserved spiritual purposes of a magical or religious sort. Art, like play, passes from the condition of being a compulsory activity necessary for life into the realm of freedom even if (again as in play) this liberation can never be wholly successful. Hence we have the explanation of the two types of artist: that which creates from an inner need and that which does so from an inner surplus. But in both cases the greatest part of creative force can come only from an excess that arises during and out of the actual creation, just as in play the playing itself is needed to liberate the energy in the individual. The productive process itself, combined with the incessant struggle for individual freedom against the bonds of the data (collective ideology or material), sets free excess forces with a greater accompaniment of pleasure the further its successful progress continues. This cumulative excess of force in the process we shall study separately in the next chapter, in its effect on the creative artist. At present we will begin by trying to make use of the art-ideological element in the understanding that we now have of play. For the ceremony, in rising from the compulsory sacrifice to nature into the realm of pleasure by the individual’s liberation from nature, acquired not only the psychical quality of play, but its æsthetic quality also. When it is still tied to nature, the ceremony is more or less an imitation thereof, whereas the freedom of play tends rather towards stylization the one being, even in the deeper sense, nearer to truth, and the other to beauty. “When I say “in the deeper sense,” I mean that man’s acceptance of his dependence on nature is more honest, while freedom-ideology, beyond a certain point, presumes the negation of that dependence and is therefore, also in a deeper sense, dishonest. This fundamental dishonesty towards nature then comes out as the consciousness of guilt, which we see active in every process of art, and which is not wholly absent from play. This feeling of guilt, of human hybris of which the Greeks were the first to become conscious also allows neither play nor the exercise of art to rise wholly from compulsion to freedom; nay, the more strongly man feels his freedom and his independence, the more intense on the other hand is the consciousness of guilt, which appears in the individual partly restrictive, partly creative, but in the community is accompanied by the gradual growth and formation of another ideology, that of truth, which acts paralysingly on the freedom of the ideology of beauty. This scientific ideology born of the feeling of guilt therefore appears first in Greece, where the idea of artistic beauty also attained its greatest freedom.” The Greeks were the first to become conscious of this guilt feeling resulting from hubris over an independence from nature that is taken to the extreme in Greece. This led to the development of a truth-ideology in examination of the guilt feeling, which then became a spiritual compulsion in the need to justify a new passion for truth; which is the basis for any ideology. Thereafter, the truth-ideology comes to represent a mortal belief in the soul alongside the beauty-ideology that was always a belief about immortality, albeit for souls in the kingdom of the dead. The two ideologies intrude one on the other in development of the foundational dualism between an individual deathproblem and the collective immortality idea. The immortal dead soul is thus created in the mortal living being. We can see how this affects both the meaningful content and the æsthetic form depending on the collective soul-belief. 80 Rank uses the two examples of portraiture and tragedy to illustrate the rise of this truthideology. Ernst Pfuhl provides the history of portraiture, and it’s an interesting question, ‘when did people begin painting portraits?’ When primitive man abstractly represents the soul in concrete materials he is actually providing a realistic presentation so we must be careful interpreting when and how a picture constitutes our sense of “likeness”. Pfuhl thinks there is no single real portrait through the 5th Century, and he says that our sensibility in earlier work is a projection onto what really are idealized forms. The date isn’t as important to Rank as the underlying problem in how the realistic individual likeness represents an idea of the “truth” about one person’s living soul, and how this idea begins to intrude on art. The change in Greek art is from an ideal type of poet, philosopher, etc. to the particular individual who is unique and not to be confused with another. “And even if we take up no definite attitude to the purely academic question of date, it still seems very remarkable—even more so than the supposed miracle of an early portraiture, that Pfuhl should, “feel compelled to take the first individual likeness, in the purely realistic sense,” to be that of Aristotle1 the very man, he adds, who created a literary biography out of earlier attempts; and, we may add, who is the admitted prototype of scientific ideology, which thus found pictorial expression in this individual head.” Earlier poets (Homer, Sophocles, Euripides), Pfuhl argues, are cast in an idealized likeness that Rank says reflects the collective nature of their poetic material.2 “For the philosopher, who first came into existence in Greece, represents a new individual type, while the artist is as old as humanity itself and links up—in point of subject and even partly of form—to a millennial tradition.” Considering the three great tragedians, we can see how this changing interest regarding a particular individual (more than an idealized type) begins to intrude on art. “The dithyrambic Æschylus is followed by the psychologizing Sophocles, and he by the moralizing Euripides. In Sophocles’ Oedipus which therefore psycho-analysis is quite right in taking as its example—we see the new truth-ideology victoriously attacking the æsthetic laws of dramatic action. The Oedipus gives us an action developed in reverse order, which is as much as to say that it provides a psychological genesis for the destiny theory; thus a direct path leads thence to Ibsen’s Wild Duck, which was the product of the materialistic science of the nineteenth century. Oedipus pays for the solution of the Sphinx’s riddles, if not directly with his life, at least with his happiness; but the impulse to penetrate to the truth behind appearances is stronger than any other ideology.” Æschylus’ Prometheus pays for a particular sin, but his offense really is personal arrogance and it doesn’t matter what he wanted to discover. Oedipus is even more modern in that he only is allowed to act with introspective examination of the psychological motives for his actions. 1 In this he follows Studniczka: Das Bildnis des Aristoteles (Leipzig 1908): it can hardly have been sculpted much before 325, since the philosopher died in 322, in his sixty-second year. 2There is no personal portrait of Æschylus; the date of the Sophocles head is disputed (Pfuhl, op cit., p. 11); i.e., it is of the transition period; the portraits of the consciously interpreting Euripides have a strong individualistic effect. 81 “Between Oedipus and Gregers [from Ibsen’s Wild Duck] stands their spiritual kinsman Hamlet, who, however, is not the pattern for the truth-seeking healer, but the godfather of the thought-obstructed neurotic.” Art in early Greece primarily represents a type. With the influence of the science ideology, however, this type must now be individually represented. Science is interested in the special case, particular variations, and the general formulation. The particulars of a work of art are not as important as the work itself. Our appreciation of Oedipus is not enhanced just-by knowing more about Sophocles any more than we gain appreciation by studying Ibsen’s life as a sober pharmacist. Shakespeare’s case, with the question of actual authorship, “. . . is reckoned by Hermann Bahr as an invaluable advantage which the poet possesses over Goethe, about whom every schoolboy can quote the facts which are supposed to explain the growth and meaning of his work. In this sense the modern “psychological” biography represents the latest intrusion of the ideology of science into that of art. “This conflict between the ideologies of truth and beauty, which only worked its way into the full consciousness of mankind in Greece, is actually as old as humanity itself, because in last analysis the root of it is the dualism between mortality and immortality. For, in our view, even the most primitive art consists in the attempt to make the abstract idea of the soul “true” by making it concrete; that is, æsthetically satisfying, or, in other words, beautiful. The question whether primitive likenesses were portraits or of symbolic character could therefore become prominent in art-history only as and when truth and beauty fell apart, as they have increasingly done in the European spiritual culture from the time of the Greeks onwards. For primitive artists the question was quite meaningless, for their truth was not realistic, but spiritual.” Still, the first pictures of men were those spiritual representations of the dead, with the soul symbolizing their continued existence apart from the living. African poles of the dead, totem poles of the American Indians, and also the menhir statues all represent dead people. Herbert Kuhn emphasizes that, “The dead man is represented on the menhir statues, not naturalistically, but, in accord with the thought of the time, imaginatively.” The strongly stylized portraits of late Neolithic times are followed by the still more schematic representations of the bronze age and a geometric style. “The reason for this,” Ranks says, “no doubt lies in the increasing development of the soul-idea, which made a literal reproduction of man more and more unnecessary, while the abstract soul-idea, as the essential, received more and more expression.” The oldest and most realistic representations are embalmed corpses, of which the Klaatsch so-called crouched graves are an example. Thus, the oldest representations are also sculptures prior to paintings. The earliest paintings illustrate dead people, who have souls, pictured alongside live animals that don’t. Later, the animal becomes the bearer of the soul, and thereafter the two forms mingle, because animals can be represented as having a soul, and man also as being alive. “In any case we believe we have made it clear that the truth-and-beauty ideology which corresponded to the mortal and immortal, to life and death, originally found expression in different art-forms before it split into two different spiritual attitudes 82 Figure 11.1: in Greece. These, the scientific and the æsthetic, thereafter influence also the further development of art-ideology in Western Europe. It might be said that until the Greeks living man was never the subject of artistic, certainly not of plastic, representation, but only the dead; that is, the soul that lived on after death. What enabled the Greeks, however, to override this tabu, which is still held among savages, and to represent living men as well, was the fact that they had in the mean while achieved a philosophical notion of the soul through their ideology of scientific truth and so had disembarrassed themselves of the one great problem, which had always exercised the artist hitherto, that of the concrete representation of the soul. When the Greek idea of the soul became that of the Psyche, man acquired living that soul which earlier had been something into which death changed him, and thereafter the art of human portraiture more and more depicts the soul of the living. This artistic freedom in the representation of the living soul found its highest expression in portraiture, which does not represent the actual, but the essential, man that is, the soul. But whereas in pre-Greek art the dead man’s soul could only be represented abstractly, and not as living, the representation of the living 83 Figure 11.2: Reliefs in the Graves of Petit Morin, Marne soul, which reached its culmination in portraiture, required a living soul for its very purpose of giving the picture life. And thus finally the living soul was no longer taken from the object depicted, but ‘added’ by the working artist himself, of whom we then say that he has “put his soul into” the work and given it both life and immortality.” We can admire the artistic æsthetic that makes such work possible, even in photographs. The artist pours his soul in the work where the æsthetic allows us to see more than mere imitation. Art is a spiritual expression, and mere reproduction, Rank believes, is not art, or at least not great art. In Egypt, the dead man had to live on in the Beyond just the way he was when he was living, and hence his spiritual portrait had to be as exact as possible. The Greek poet or philosopher had an ideal immortality, and hence his portrait had to be the purest expression of this spirituality; it was beautiful while the other was only true. The ka, or life-principle, in Egyptian belief protected the man in the afterlife, and had to be carefully fed otherwise the man would suffer. The regular offerings of food on the altar table were later only filled on ceremonial days, and still later only by painting pictures of food on the walls of the tomb. Greek art rose higher and gave even living man a soul, a process that Rank also sees as linked to the affirmation of sexuality as intelligence and the knowledge regarding a greater control of nature. This move from the chthonian foundation follows the familiar pattern of life being associated with the vital organs and rising to the intellectualized head-cult that denies natural origins. The spirit that is put into a work reflects this æsthetic according to the dominant ideology. Representations of the god Hermes are another example. The earliest forms are just piles of rocks, herms in the road, similar to the omphalos forms that are essential in founding cities as centers of the earth. Later representations of Hermes include the ithyphallic features as a vegetation god who assists with fertilizing mother earth. A third, and fully artistic form is the early pillar and later statue with the head as the noblest part. “In this process, revealed in the herms that were everywhere to be found, and especially in Arcadia and Attica, we can easily recognize the cultural movement from below upwards, from the chthonian mother-principle, via the reproductive father-principle, to the head-culture of the soul, which culminates in the Classical portrait bust.” Hermes is god not just of agriculture but also cleverness and inventions, even of thieves and cheats, and we saw in the last chapter how games and destiny relate to the deception or cheating of nature from her due. Since speech is also necessary for cleverness, we find Hermes figuring in Hellenistic sculpture as the god of oratory, and the wings that were on the feet are in the statue at Naples are transferred to the head or hat. 84 Figure 11.3: Symbolic Representation of Christ’s Resurrection Through the Soul-Bird Charadrius “At this later stage the original wind-god (pneuma) not only appears as god of speech (*logos*), but almost as such as allegorization of thought (speed) as has been given spiritual expression in modern times by Rodin.” Rank sees this development toward a head-culture, saturated with the scientific ideology, generally reflected in Greek culture. In the drive toward intellectualized order, however, mythic features remain. The Greeks were particularly fond of the number seven, for example. A prePythogrean manuscript attributed to Hippocrates describes seven spheres, seven worlds within the earth, seven constellations, seven winds, seven seasons, and seven ages. Even the individual was composed of seven parts, and Greece herself is named as the Peloponnesian head, Isthmus neck, Ionian diaphragm, Hellespont legs, Bosporoi feet, Egyptian upper trunk, and the Euxine sea—Maeotic sea as lower trunk and rectum. This bodily characterization Rank interprets in psychological terms where Sparta represents a conscious will with its purposeful intent to rule, but the spiritual life is still identified with the breath coming out of Ionia. Rank leaves it to others to investigate this macrocosmic-microcosmic ordering in other areas like medicine and architecture. The reciprocal influence of the beauty-truth dualism probably penetrates all Ionian sciences from philosophy to physics. The Greeks developed this dualism to a maximum intensity. A guilt feeling about their art becoming untethered from nature compelled them to humanize their religion and art, and create for themselves in science a special ideology to justify the compensating drive to truth. Rank finds the birth of the scientific ideology here because it permeates not just the special sciences but the whole of Greek intellectual life and finally the spiritual life that is the foundation of every ideology. In Greece we have the first scientific psychology in the sense of a soul-doctrine. Earlier views of the soul, even with Homer, only are among the dead, and this primitive idea is only later unified 85 Figure 11.4: when the intellectual love of truth merges into one living soul that became the Psyche. “The development of the idea of the soul thus leads from an original contrast between the multiplicity of living function and the unity of the soul of the dead to an explicit dualism as between the soul of the living and the dead, and hence to an ultimate unification which assumed a “psyche” (that is, a soul of the dead) to exist also in the living. “Thus the inner dualism of Greek humanity—expressed respectively in the artistic and scientific ideologies of the beautiful (that is, the immortal) and of the true (that is, the mortal soul)—was harmoniously unified in the unitary soul of philosophy, which led thereafter in Christianity to the complete spiritualization of man.” This interplay between personal and collective is one reason why Rank thinks there can be no psychology of the individual because the collective conveys its content as the quality of the soul. The concept of truth, on the other hand, he finds to qualitatively be subjective, with psychology the most subjective of all, and the intellectual heir of the old soul-concept. A scientific soul-ideology thus influences art in this interplay between individual and society. The interplay also highlights the role of form as is illustrated in the influence of Greek mathematics on music, and the ideologizing of the cosmos. Music originally was closely associated with body movements, like ornamental art, in a personal expression, given a priori by the pulse of the heartbeat and breathing rhythm, before the Greeks gave it a mathematical foundation collectively based on the truth of numbers. The hebdomadal system, however, is still mythic (illustrating the impact art has on science), with seven vowels to the voice, and seven notes of scale, seven strings of the lyre and seven stops on the oldest syrinx. These correspond to the seven Muses, and even the seven-membered chorus. Pythagorean idealism associates this with harmony, and shows the interconnection in the ideologies of music and physics. Analogically regarding music, then, we see it as a spatial metaphor alongside speech 86 Figure 11.5: with the character of extension into the infinite. Ideological conflict, between the æsthetic and the scientific, with the interplay of effects on religion, philosophy and art, returns us to the problem of form and content. Form tends toward the primitive and eternal whereas content admits temporal meaning. We saw in Myth and Metaphor how metaphor is used in poetry, and how Homer’s particular metaphor of space is aimed at capturing a lost Greek culture. Proust uses a temporal metaphor to recall a personal past thereby also creating its own peculiarity of arbitrary expression. The multiple metaphors of Macbeth are used to limit the drama in a way that spares the spectator from the bloody action. In this sense, content tends to condense the changes of meaning over the ages and allows for unique cultural expression. Drawing and dance also use and reuse spatial forms (like the line drawn into an eternal circle), but with particular content for the collective audience. Early ornamentation likewise is symbolic and personal, but is collectively developed in later content using totems stylized as human, animal and mythic forms. The eye is a pure form used to convey the highest abstraction, and Rank has shown how this form also reflects a movement to the head-culture from the lower, vital organs with an intellectualized independence from nature. Thus, we have the representation of an eagle in Indian culture, or the spiral idealized as the eye or sun. Content allows meaningful expression in personal forms that are collectively understood. The influence of one on the other can be followed in parallel cultural development, and Rank pays particular attention to the spiral for this illustration. The spiral represents a geometrization of organic form that parallels the movement from chthonian origins to spiritualized projections. When I first read AaA, this was one part where I thought to myself about my own work with ceramics, ‘Gosh, I should have been putting spirals on everything!’ We can see how the spiral resembles entrails, and the mythical labyrinth associated with the lower, vital organs and an early seat of the soul. This begins in the Neolithic age, and later appears in the Kamares vases in Crete. Spirals are a form imposed on early vessels as coil pots where the vessel is completed with body, neck, head, ears, spout, etc. Ornament is also imprinted on these 87 otherwise practical vessels and returns us to this issue of decoration. F. Adama van[?] Scheltema concludes that ornament, which was originally a part of the vase, later became independent of the vessel, like a spirit separated from the body. In his Die Altnordische Kunst (1928), he recognizes a general cultural significance in soul belief. “The emancipation of ornament as a spiritual form from the natural body of its carrier implies a belief in the independence of the spirit in relation to the body, a belief, that is, in the independence of the soul.” Figure 11.6: Rank associates the artistic productivity of an individual, and maybe the culture, as beginning with one’s own human body and ascending to the creation and artistic formation of a soul-endowed personality. Body ornament has a direct relation to the body, whereas ornament is decorative. The animal dances of the Indians and the hunting ceremonies of the Bushman, for example, show how there is a pre-animistic identification, to gain strength or superiority, using 88 feathers or animal skin adornments which may have taken a higher principle in body painting. Traces may even survive in our culture where Rank sees it in the feminine fashions of his day. Self-creative illustration tends to demonstrate a certain independence and individual expression. When moved to the collective wall, so to speak, the work becomes decoration. Music that begins with personal expression in rhythm and repetition takes on communal meaning with infinite melody and the cosmic immortality of the music of the spheres. This movement of a personal expression in form to a communal content, similar to Rank’s presentation of a personal language and collective understanding, is elevated to the highest level in Greece. It explains the qualitative difference between Greek and Egyptian art. Egyptian culture, and especially its art, is spatial and dumb, compared to the Greek which is temporal and eloquent. Egypt is a land of the dead, with cavernous tombs, and Greece is a land of the living, with airy temples that reach for the heavens. Egyptian figures of gods and man are also mute, and in Greece they become animated and expressive. The old god of heaven, Uranus, is castrated by Kronos, the symbol of the time-idea, which the Greeks transform into Chronos, and thereafter the time-god rules in a temporal sense rather than a static cyclical eternity. This conquest of the old nature-principle comes through reason, and Rank notes how Prometheus, Oedipus and Odysseus all achieve as much through cunning as from force, where this pride in cheating nature is also their downfall. Egypt uses static form to embody the soul, and the Greeks turn to dynamic time in their representation. The serpent no longer represents the intestines, but the sun-spiral. “The form is thus determined by the collective will-ideology, the content by the partially independent will-psychology of the creator. Intimately as form and content may be united, especially in the finest work, this unity seems to be the result of a harmonious unification of two contraries: not merely in the sense that form is given collectively in style, while the content is in every case a matter of free selection (and therefore, amongst others, in that of the subjective choice of the artist himself), but also since a strong and powerful form often compensates a weak content and vice versa.” Because the individual uses the collective forms for expression, we can see the movement to higher objective levels. The discovery of æsthetic forms by cultural ideologies is the continuation and elaboration of this subjective process. “If we take modern art as a comparison ready to hand, we find that both, form as well as content, are becoming more and more individually subjective, and that the impulse to create, which is still fundamentally the same, is more and more a matter of consciousness in the artist. But there is a certain limit to subjectivity which the most individual of artists cannot pass; and for two reasons: because the creative impulse, which is fundamentally always the same, implies a similar principle of form, or, better, impulse to form: and secondly because, if the work is to have some general influence, it must manipulate some collective content of general human significance. Thus, subjectively, there does exist in the artist the creative impulse which in the individual, as arising from the conflict between the lower and the higher self, corresponds to what in the history of culture we have traced as a gradual defeat of the animal by the spiritual principle. This impulse includes those elements of the conflict which strive towards the voluntary control and domination of the lower by the higher self; the actual victory comes, in art, from the will-like impulse to form, which at first aims at no more than a cessation of the conflict by delimiting and ordering it. This impulse to form, and at first finds, collective traditional forms, which had been produced by similar conflicts in the course 89 Figure 11.7: Metal Relief from China (Notice the sun-spirals on the animal’s body. of cultural development, and which in many cases carry with them their particular content. These collectively transmitted or dominant forms constitute what in their totality we call style, by accepting which (in whatever degree) the artist does subject himself to a principle outside his individual self. And though it may be collective, it is yet a man-created collectivity, and not one prescribed by nature. Here too our earlier formulation of the imitation-ideology fits into its place, for while we allowed imitation its full importance, we showed besides that it is no matter of simply copying nature, but of representing nature as already altered or interpreted by man in his own sense (macrocosm-microcosm). “The artist, then, represents the type in which the primeval conflict between the lower and higher self is still so intense that he cannot merely fall back for a solution upon the collective forms which are ready to hand, but were created by past generations in relation to their religious, artistic, and (games, sport) social institutions. He certainly uses these forms to some extent, but actively as an individual, not passively as one of the crowd. In his inner conflict, the, which corresponds potentially to that of earlier cultures, he looks instinctively later, perhaps, consciously for collective forms to justify and to liberate himself, but he also looks for a collective (material) content, so that he may achieve simultaneously personal freedom and collective effect. This explains the religious content of Egyptian and partly even of Greek art (though already the latter owes its significance to the humanizing tendency); it explains also the choice of biblical subjects by Christian artists, and in general the choice of historical subjects. With this view of the genetics of culture, it becomes clear not only that the individual artist, at any rate the great artist, must (at least potentially) recapitulate in himself the whole evolution from collective to individual art in its separate, though perhaps not necessarily chronological, stages, but that it is only by the subjugation in himself of these collective forms and contents that the really mature works of great masters are created. Moreover, the value set on great artists depends on the predominant ide90 ology of their time; if it is still collective, that artists will be regarded as the greatest of his time, and the finest representative of it in the future, who has expressed the collective elements in their purest and most vigorous form. If on the other hand the general ideology is interwoven with individualistic tendencies, as at the Renaissance and in the succeeding “age of genius,” the greatest artist will be he who embodies this individualized collective ideology in the purest form which means, who has most definitely impressed on traditional forms the stamp of his personality, or (speaking in collective terms) individualism. The highest type of artist is he who can use the typical conflict of humanity within himself to produce collective values, which, though akin to the traditional in form and content because in principle they spring from the same conflict are yet individual, and new creations of these collective values, in that they present the personal ideology of the artist who is the representative of his age.” 91 92 Chapter 12 The Artist’s Fight with Art Nous sommes faits pour le dir´e et no pour l’avoir. Flaubert These last few chapters primarily display Rank’s insights. I expect my “essays” will correspondingly be shorter. “These last folk-psychological chapters, in which we have dealt with those cultural ideologies of the various nations and epochs that underlie artistic production, have brought us back to our initial problem—the relation of the artist to the art-ideology of his time. We began by approaching the problem from the side of the psychology of the artist and there said that the creative personality makes use of the art-ideology which his culture supplies; but the subsequent discussion of cultural questions led to another and almost contrary view. For, from that point of view, the individual, however powerfully his personality may develop, appeared more as an instrument, which the community uses for the expression of its own cultural ideology. This is not by any means a new conception, for it played the chief role in the so-called “environment” theories of genius; but the fresh problem that we wish to discuss here is the double attitude of the personal artist to the prevailing art-ideology, which, on the one hand, he uses for the justification of his individual creativity, but, on the other, opposes with all the vigour of his personality. This conflict between artist and art is quite as important for the understanding of the creative process as is the positive influence of the cultural art-ideology on the individual work; it has its social analogue in the defensive reaction of the individual to collective influences of every sort, and its biological basis in the conflict between individuation and generation, from which the individual can only to a limited extent escape. “Thus the ideological art-will of form and the human art-willing of the artist stand in opposition, and the work of art, which results from this conflict, differs in the different epochs of cultural development according to the strength of the personal or that of the collective will.” 93 The essence of the artist is how they pass through this conflict between collective ideological art-will and personal human art-willing. Everyone experiences the general tension between individuation and the fear of isolation, but the artist uniquely experiences this basic dualism which Rank interprets as a fear of life and a fear of death. Our modern poets, Nietzsche and Goethe, even philosophically study this process in self-reflection. Psychoanalysis has fostered this movement with the promise of a new ideology of self-discovery through art that nevertheless fails to resolve this tension. We individually owe artistic development, like any form of our personality development, to our-selves and the conditions of our time. In our collective search for explanations about why strong individual personalities develop on our cultural stage, our current psychological biographies fail because there is no true scientific answer. The solution to the conflict is personal, and we see that in the artist’s fight with art. Our modern problem is that our individual ideology can provide no collective symbol for the artist to use in resolving the conflict, but Rank believes a new formation of personality development may be possible. The individual has a defensive reaction to collective influences, but can only partially escape. “Thus the ideological art-will of form and the human art-willing of the artist stand in opposition, and the work of art, which results from this conflict, differs in the different epochs of cultural development according to the strength of the personal or that of the collective will.” Egyptian stone masons lived in a rigid society, for example, and their individual work is expressed in the collective structure and mass of the giant tombs and the silent Sphinx; the dead glory of the mythical Ozymandias. Greek art, as we have seen, has a national glory where the art is beautiful and great in large part because it is so Greek. Dynamic individuals, who revived classical forms in the Renaissance, were likewise given collective support by recognition of their individuality as a new genius type. An ongoing cycle can be seen in the Baroque rebuilding of the churches led by the Spanish Jesuits, the Roccoco defeat of the Church Baroque by the French spirit, etc. These collective ideologies are what we call style, and they illustrate the conflict between a new-born ideology (religious, national, or individual) and an old one. This struggle of worldviews is microcosmically reflected in the individual artist’s fight with art. The artist experiences a general cultural tension between competing ideologies, and he contributes an individual solution. This solution is influenced by the collective symbolism, but the movement that leads to the tension begins as a cultural movement and not a personal one. The artist probably feels this more than other individuals, and perhaps foresees what will come, but this makes the struggle doubly difficult because the emancipation is against ideological symbols that the artist at first strengthened, and against which he subsequently is obligated to liberate himself. When the artist fought his way out of the suffocating Gothic and Classical styles, for example, the culture was there to support the liberation by nominating their individualism as genius even as they were employing classical themes. This move to individualization leaves a heavy burden for those who follow because the more internal the struggle becomes the less the collective ideologies (especially in the case of religion) are able to help carry the burden. “The essence of the artistic type therefore lies therefore in this, that he can pass through his individual struggle, the conflict between individual and genus, between personal and collective immortality, in and *ideological* form, and that the peculiar quality of this conflict compels him, or enables him, to use an *artistic* ideology for the purpose. For, as we have seen, the same fundamental conflict may, with a different attitude, lead to the individual’s resolving the inner dualism by means of a scientific or a political ideology.” 94 An ideologizing of personal conflicts happens, in part, for everyone who chooses or pursues any profession. We all begin our personality development by patterning ourselves on the ideal of our parents or teachers, and we all react against them (usually around puberty) in our attempts to advance our individual development. To do this, we use new collective forms or alternative leaders. The artist type seems to be quicker in picking up an artistic ideology in this phase of individual resistance. A reason for this difference seems to be that art is not just a calling as much as it is a part of himself, and this part he ideologically represents. “For the artist, therefore, his calling is not a means of livelihood, but life itself; and this explains not only the difficulties of his existence, since his main object cannot be the earning of money, but his struggles in love and life, which in the productive type spring from the impulse to create, and not vice versa.” In the first chapter Rank introduced the idea that the artist is self-nominating in their creative urge to personality development, and here Rank considers how their mature work often demonstrates this in a pinnacle effort representing their ultimate urge to liberation and selfexpression. Everyone generally feels this tension between liberation and conformity, but the artist pointedly feels it as life itself, and the high stakes involved for the creative type have a natural parallel to the failure of the neurotic type. Creative power for both the neurotic and artistic type centers on the self, but whereas the neurotic exhausts himself in occupation with himself, the artist is able to objectify the subjective process and transfer it to his work. In the all or nothing dynamic, the neurotic chooses nothing, but the artist finds a middle way. “The artist, however, here also, in spite of the many difficulties and struggles, finds a constructive, a middle way: he avoids the complete loss of himself in life, not be remaining in the negative attitude, but by living himself out entirely in his work. This fact is so obvious that, when we instinctively admire some great work of art, we say the whole artist is in it and expresses himself in it.” Such an approach will have different results in different epochs with different individuals. Rank examines the Gothic and Classical for various features of moral, social and æsthetic ideologies, and the people that represent them in this tension between ego and ideology. “We may remark here that every production of a significant artist, in whatever form, and of whatever content, always reflects more or less clearly this process of selfliberation and reveals the battle of the artist against the art which expresses a now surmounted phase of the development of his ego.” Goethe and Nietzsche, in our modern era, became conscious of this process and philosophically reflected upon it. Rank himself says he prophesied this increasing extension of consciousness in his Kunstler* (1905) when he first began working with Freud. In that work, he remarks that this, double separation of the ego from the collectivity and of part of the ego from its totality includes the two fundamental life-processes: individuation on the one hand, and procreation or generation on the other. This includes our biological foundation, but with additional features that explain a difference between the average “partial” type of person satisfied with belonging in religious, communal, social, vocational, or family feelings and a “total” type that insists on grasping the whole world or, like the neurotic, hiding from it. The artist and the neurotic both feel this Weltschmerz, 95 “. . . but here the paths diverge, since the artist can use this introverted world not only as a protection but as a material; he is thus never wholly oppressed by it— though often enough profoundly depressed—but can penetrate it by and with his own personality and then again thrust it from him and re-create it from himself.” Deeper than a sexual begetting and bearing, this goes to a more fundamental level of liberation and generation where the ego’s throwing-away of a part of itself is felt as a relief and not a loss. While there is this growing sense of consciousness with the work of art as artist among artists, there is also a basic representation for artists as a precondition of all creativity. “In this super-individual, almost cosmic, creative process all the purely human factors—love, sexual relations, social duties—throng in to hinder or help so that a psychological cast is given to the conflict (though this is by no means as important as artists themselves feel and as biographers and analytical psychographers still would have us believe).” In consideration of the role a Muse plays, for example, biography typically fails in its attempt to find causality. Rank would be the last to deny the importance of a mother figure and the trauma of birth, but while the artist owes his biological existence to his parents, Rank feels that his artistic development is his own. “For we owe our artistic development, as we do every other form of personalitydevelopment, to none other than ourselves and the conditions of our time, though we always tend, and sometimes are driven, to ascribe to other people not only the development and further growth of ourselves, but of our work and creativity.” The problem with modern biography is that it confuses experience with creation. Rank touched on this problem in Games and Destiny (and goes into more detail with Success and Fame) that the different creative results cannot be explained by experiences common to all. Many great artists have boring bourgeois lives, for example, just like the rest of us. A Muse may appear to be a unique experience, but Rank sees that idealism as another form that only is used by the artist who might naturally feel the need to “move on” as they do with other collective forms once the work is completed and the tension returns. This is not an explanation, however, because the individual artist may or may not leave the loved one. Their decisions in any case can equally lead to the fact that many great artists often have one great work to which they are forever dedicated and which is never fully completed. “In the first case he will use the guilt-feeling directly for creation; in the second even his previous creative power will be impeded. But if the artist takes the step forward in a purely ideological sense, without the need of concrete figures for the resolution of his creative conflict, his tendency will be to *lessen* his work, even if in fact it has become greater. This minimizing tendency also is due to the feeling of guilt, but, on the other hand, this has already worked itself out creatively in the artist, and it is only humbler second thoughts that are obliged to lessen the splendor of creation.” That is why Rodin had his Porte de l’Enfer to which he referred to all his other work as mere fragments. It is how Goethe came to see his Faust as his magnum opus to which everything else was mere confession. 96 In confusing experience with creation, biographers act on behalf of the entire culture to absorb the great individual work to their collective glory. An individual explanation helps make that possible, but also demonstrates how the collective art-ideology affects the poet’s life as an individual in the society. Returning to the scant knowledge of Shakespeare’s life, or Homer, the blind Ionian singer, for example, Rank interprets that our imaginative biography and psychography represent a cultural need to tie experience and creativity together. Even if Shakespeare did not write the plays, in other words, our folk-fantasy would be compelled to create him. “Even Goethe, who could hardly dispute his own authorship, felt himself compelled to describe his whole creation as a collective work which only happened to bear his name. This feeling of the poet that he is the mouthpiece of his age or, for that matter, of all humanity, explains not only why he has to ascribe his work to a Muse and thus connect it with his personal life and give it concrete form; it also throws a light on the fact that, and the degree to which, the art-ideology affects the poet’s life. There is thus an influence of personal experience on creation and a reciprocal influence of creation on experience, which not only drives the artist externally to a Bohemian existence, but makes his inner life characterologically a picture of his art-ideology and thus once more calls forth the individual self in protest against this domination by that ideology.” A great artist experiences his own creation at the same time as he is working to shape what he experiences. Biography fails because it does not simply describe the experiences of an individual but hopes to explain the creativity of a personality after-the-fact. Pouring over the piles of biographical material on Goethe, biographers continue in their hope of finding some general logic or particular explanatory key. In Shakespeare’s case the reverse is true; the lack of biographical material ironically makes it easier to explain just what type of person this personality had to be. This may be why authorship has been the inspiration for countless arguments regarding the greatest creations of the human spirit such as the “historical Jesus” or the orthodoxy of sole authorship. “But always the starting point in the formation of a biography is the individual’s ideologizing of himself to be an artist, because thenceforward he must live that ideology, so far as reality allows him to do so; and so far as it does not, the artist makes for himself the experiences that he needs, searches for them and gives them forms in the sense of his ideology. . . . That in every age the poet’s life should be revalued and re-edited to suit the ideology of that age is only natural, though this does not exactly lessen the complexity of the problem.” Rank will pick up the problem in the next chapter on Success and Fame. Legend formation is not restricted to biographers, but the artist himself ideologizes his own experiences. Artists honestly begin, in their self-nomination as artists, with an a priori fight for life. The preliminary sketches for a great work, for example, are an initial working-out of something that develops as part of the process. “This process also is only intelligible through a realization of the specific dynamism of creativity, which must operate on the potential life plane if it is to liberate his energy and not consume it, as we have explained in the case of play.” The artist’s fight with art then involves a tendency to a totality of experience that he can possibly control by fleeing into creativity. Immersing himself in creative work, however, has the same danger of total absorption. 97 “Here the conflict of the artist versus art becomes a struggle of the artist against his own creation, against the vehement dynamism of this totality-tendency which forces him to complete surrender in his work. How the artist escapes this new danger, after he had previously avoided that of the total experience, is one of the obscurest and most interesting problems of the psychology of creative artists.” Various solutions are possible. Rank believes certain ways are universally accessible, and he mentions a few that are typical. One approach for the artist is to divide their attention with ordinary life, or perhaps by starting another competing work or activity, to draw attention from the one that threatens complete absorption such as Goethe indulging his scientific interest or Schiller his philosophical studies. A second way is to simply put aside the work as an example of the fear of life itself. “I have elsewhere shown that this restriction between the two poles of fear—fear of life and fear of death—is one of the fundamental processes of life; the artist seems to experience it in a similar intensified fashion to the neurotic, but with the difference that in the neurotic the fear of life predominates and so checks all expression of life, while the artist type can overcome this fear in his creation and is driven by the fear of death to immortalize himself.” The final diversion is a modern practice that appears be an inheritance from the Greeks— “This is the division of creation into knowledge, of shaping of art into science and, above all, psychology.” Among these few examples, the modern diversion is the most problematic. “Here we are discussing the far more interesting half-way type, which, whether in the course of an ensemble of creation or even within the compass of a single work, passes suddenly from the formative artist into the scientist, who wishes really he cannot help himself to establish, or rather, cannot help trying to establish, psychological laws of creation or æsthetic effect. The artistic form itself is a necessary protection for the artist against the dynamism of a conflict that would destroy him if not put into form. Conscious reflection during that process of ordering meaning and control always contains a bit of the scientific where Rank finds a new, fundamental problem, “whenever the artistic formative power is inadequate to control the chaos that is, when, instead of being a protection, it becomes a danger to the survival of the ego.” This is the modern problem inherited from the Greeks in the Western art-ideology. It is why Worringer gave his funeral oration over modern Expressionism in 1921 to the Munich Goethe Society about the loss of formative capacity being replaced by increased insight into the nature of art. Although Worringer warned artists to give-up, Rank believes the problem is the deepest problem of artistic creation whose struggle can never be solved by conscious deliberation and decision, however correct. “Nietzsche was therefore quite right when, long ago, in “Human All-too-human” he warned us against “revolution” in art and saw in its break with tradition its end. For unless it has some collective of social basis -for instance, in religion or, later, the “genius-religion”—artistic creation is impossible, and the last hopeless effort to base 98 it on a psychological ideology not only leads away from art into science, but, even so, fails on points of principle. Education or art can no more be supported on psychological ideologies than religion can be replaced by psychology. For psychology is the individual ideology par excellence and cannot become collective, even if it is generally accepted or recognized.” Rank believes the way out is to consider art production as one expression of a particular form of life. In order to do this, we may have to cut down the claims for what art can do, and limit the artist-type as a mythical ideal. The artist’s fight with art always was with, and for, the existing ideology, and our individual ideology merely duplicates the struggle between beauty and truth as between the artist’s true self and an ideal self. This orientation toward truth and not beauty is in the artist’s whole psychological attitude towards himself and his art. Art cannot be an ideology for self-knowledge because individual psychology lacks the social or collective symbols that allowed earlier artists to create; thus, a search for truth in art and life only intensifies the conflict in the person of the artist. “The more successful his discovery of truth about himself, the less he can create or even live, since illusions are necessary for both. The clearest representative of the modern artist-type seems to me to be Ibsen, who was still just capable of an artistic elaboration of this destructive problem and he too sometimes cam suspiciously near didactic, doctrinaire psychologism. “Thenceforward nothing was possible but a frank breach of all artistic forms and restraints, and the door was opened to a purely personal psychology of self-confessing and self-knowing in art, especially in poetry. Poets at first seemed to find some support in psycho-analysis, which they hoped to be able to transform into a new artistic ideology. But, for the reasons mentioned, this proved impossible, and, further, psycho-analysis has rather used the modern artist as an object of study than helped him to a psychological ideology of art. Thus from both alike, from the side of art and that of science, the way seems to be prepared for the decisive crisis, in the midst of which we stand- but also for its solution, which I foresee in a new structure of personality. This will be able to use in a constructive form the psychological insight which is so destructive when it exists as introspection, and the individual impulse to creation will turn positively towards the formation of its own personality, as indeed it did, and actively, in the earliest phases of primitive art. This is the goal which has hitherto been vainly sought by the so-called neurotic; in earlier ages he was occasionally able to achieve creatively, thanks to some collective art-ideology, but today all collective means fail and the artist is thrown back on to an individual psycho-therapy. But this can only be successful if it sees its individual problem as one conditioned both by time and by culture, whereas the modern artist is driven by the unattainability of his ideology into that neurosis out of which the neurotic vainly seeks a creative escape—vainly, because the social ideologies are lacking which could fulfill and justify his personal conflict. Both will be achieved in a new formation of personality, which can, however, be neither a therapy of neuroses nor a new psychological art ideology, but must be a constructive process of acceptance and development of one’s individual personality as a new type of humanity, and in order to create the new it will have to give up much that has been received from tradition and become dear to it. This new must first of all be a new personality-type, which may thereafter perhaps find a new art-form suited to it, but in any case will not feel any compulsion to justify its personal impulse to create by starting from the ideology of long surmounted art-forms.” 99 100 Chapter 13 Success and Fame Not in that he leaves something behind him, but that in that he works and enjoys and stirs others to work and enjoyment, does man’s importance lie Goethe Not much I can add to these last chapters. Rank’s elaborations on a few themes are worth reading in their entirety (the interplay of success, fame and great work took me several readings to understand). “The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse, and even against his own work shows itself also in his attitude towards success and fame; indeed, these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which we saw beginning in subjective form with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with this self-nomination to be an artist and concludes in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies— one might almost say, two personalities of the individual—are throughout in continual conflict: the one which wishes to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other which wants to spend itself in ordinary life—in a word, the mortal man and the immortal soul of man. This universal human conflict, which was resolved through many thousands of years by religion and the art which rested upon its ideology, has become more and more acute and difficult with the growth of individual art, until with modern artists it has taken on a form very like that of a neurosis. The conflict was always particularly intense in the artist, and this of course is one of the reasons why he was obliged to seize hold of ideological means for its settlement. For because of its “totality-tendency” the creative type is inclined, in this struggle between life and creation, to give up the one wholly in favour of the other, and this naturally intensifies the conflict rather than solves it. “We have already discussed in detail how this conflict spreads itself over experience and production. I should like to add, in outline, at least, how the same fundamental conflict is reflected in that most remarkable relation between achievement and success, 101 which are often indeed in the harshest opposition. This problem falls within the bounds of our present investigation in point of subject -seeing that it concerns the artist and his creativity—but even in method it does not go beyond them, since we are once again concerned with interaction of individual and society.” The relation of an individual to the society is a central theme in Rank’s work, and an artist’s relation to his work, his public and posterity, is always both individual and collective. Artists are independent insofar as they are self-nominating in their creative urge, but they cannot entirely dispense with society. Success and fame are two types of relations with active concern for both the individual and the group. The individual art products eventually are surrendered to the public, and the process is painful on both sides. This conflict gave rise to the productivity in the first place, and generally represents both an individual and a social tension. Success and fame complete the work of the artist as well as a vast circle in the eternal conflict between individual and group. Rank agrees with Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum who complained about the complete lack of studies to found any basis for the social psychology of artistic works and the artist’s fame. What is the relation of the artist to his public and to posterity, and what is their attitude to him and his work? Tendencies of both the individual and the social seem to be at work at different times and between different individuals and groups. Individual expression is not absent in the primitive collective ideology, and modern individuals eventually are subject to a collective audience. Cultural recognition, and a strong ideology in the Renaissance period, established the genius-type for individual achievements. Rank proposes that this collective feature actually keeps the individual artist from exhibiting their whole self because the individual feature cannot be entirely surrendered in the creative urge. The relation is not just cautiously managed in order to protect a weakness or deficiency, but it represents a basic human principle where people have a tendency to show their worst side and keep the best for themselves. This parsimony affects both actual creation and influences success and fame. Because creation is a liberating process for the individual, surrendering the offspring of creation involves a painful giving by the artist at the mercy of acceptance by the public. “Obviously I do not mean supply and demand in the market, but a purely spiritual problem, which is one of the deepest there is: the problem, that is, how far the artist is willing and capable of ‘weaning’ this work which he created by and for himself, and how far he tends to keep it for himself, or at least refuse to impart it to others. “For from the moment when the work is taken over and recognized by the public, it ceases to be the possession of the artist, not only economically but spiritually. Just as the artist created it from his own needs, the public accepts it to alleviate its own wants, and, whatever they make of it, it never remains what it was originally; it ceases to be the personal achievement of the individual and becomes a symbol for others and their spiritual demands. This “misunderstanding”, which the artists feels, is inevitable and the price at which fame is bought.” A struggle against fame is a struggle against depersonalization. In addition, the artist’s struggle against the collective can have an ironic and paradoxical opposition to success itself. “The artist or his circle may complain unceasingly of lack of success and yet they will often reveal motives which impede or delay that success.” The artist can indeed nominate himself to be an artist, and even ideologically make himself one, but this power of achievement does not include that of imposing himself. Achievement and 102 success are two basic tendencies that struggle against one another in the artist. This antagonism lies at the root of life and creativity where success in life is success in the very life from which the artist fled to art for refuge. Fame, on the other hand, represents a complete depersonalization of the artist whose work is, in a sense, taken-over by the public. This ultimate collective appropriation illustrates a public personality as well, in general, compared to the creative type and his work. “The average man has great difficulty dealing with ideologies; he needs concrete personifications in religion, for instance, or myths or leadership and his preference for a definite concrete person is something that even such spiritual movements as Christianity cannot evade. It is here, and not merely in a curiosity and sensationalism, that the origin of the public’s interest in the person of the artist lies. This interest moreover cannot be satisfied with the usually dull facts of the artist’s external life, for his personality is inquired into, not for human or psychological reasons, but in order that he may be made the concrete representation of his work. In this also the public completes the act of self-creation that the artist alone cannot achieve, and would not if he could. For the residue of human nature which lies between his person and his work is his life in actuality, and it disturbs the harmonious unitary picture of work and creator which the hero-worshipping public demands. And we see at once the similarity between this and the creation of a god, a process which has been so magnificently successful because the gods could be abstracted from the creation without even a cinder being left. “But though the artist, at least at the summit of his ideological development, is far less dependent on concrete personalities than the masses, yet he cannot wholly dispense with them and is therefore dependent on men for a link between his artistic creations, however vital, and real life.” The root tendencies are our individual and collective concern with the fact of immortality. “We must now deal with the relation of achievement and success, but particularly that of success and fame. Without committing ourselves to definitions of these very vague terms, I should like to refer success to the living and fame to the dead, or, more loosely, to understand by success something which means something actual to the creative artist (I do not mean merely material gain) - whereas fame, like work itself, has a more ideological significance and concerns the work rather than the artist. No matter how far this distinction is justified, it at least opens up the possibility of approach to the actual psychological problem, which is what chiefly interests us here. Fame, which we have taken as a collective continuation of the artistic creative process, is not always, certainly not necessarily, connected with the greatness of a work; it often attaches to an achievement whose chief merit is not its high quality but some imposing characteristic, sensational either in itself or in its topical circumstances. Putting it roughly, we might say that an achievement marked by supreme quality tends to bring success, and one marked by something other than this quality to bring rather fame both then and thereafter; not only because the masses are probably inaccessible to the supreme quality and can only be gradually educated up to it because the qualitatively supreme achievement leaves nothing for the public to do—at most, to imagine another equally perfect creator. The one-sided or (psychologically speaking) compensatory work is more amenable to the catch-phrases of a fashion or movement, but to attain to such importance it needs certain favourable circumstances, whereas the supreme work can wait in peace, since the valuation it awaits will always supervene. In the other case what the work lacks to make it complete is added to it by the social acquisition of 103 fame. After all, society and posterity are far more concerned in this than in the original creator and his work, which is only more or less annexed by some collective need, as a means of giving concrete expression to some general trend, and at the same time to invest it with the sanction of genius. “Seen thus, fame not only is a hollow thing, because it is almost a depersonalization, but is transitory, since it depends on definite circumstances which give it birth and with which it often perishes, even though later ages may give it a new life for other purposes.1 “Fame seems to attach itself to men and achievements which we call “epochmaking”, but when a creation of the moment is recognized and rewarded with fame it is really conditioned by an epoch already in course of growth.” A strong individual may not need the culture’s ideology. On the other hand, the society can complete a change in ideology without needing the artist. Strong individuals who draw no practical advantage from being recognized, but who makes great practical contributions and later becomes famous, for example, have often been dreamers like Columbus. Rank says that society is fond of making legends out of this type. It does, however, confuse the recipe for success and fame. “It almost seems as though there were an economic law that only one party can extract something from a great achievement, either the man himself or others, either his contemporaries or posterity. From this it is clear that the chances for the creator to get something for his work are one against three and that even the first possibility is never perfectly fulfilled, because he must in any case share his success and fame with others, and thus has to give up a share not only in his work but of his own self, for collective valuation in terms of success and fame.” The building up of fame is collective, and the artistic success therefore depends on contemporaries and posterity. When the community grants an artist immortality through posterity then ordinary mortals participate in the art project just as they might by burial in the royal tomb (as the grave of Christ). “The artist in himself provides in his work the raw material which the community uses in the creation of biographies and fame as an expression of its own eternalization. This partially explains the mysterious agreement between the great achievement and the prevailing general ideology especially when we consider that this process always begins in the lifetime or the artist, who often anticipates this collective transformation by adapting his creation to a great extent to the needs of the community. This obviously does not mean in the case of great artists a concession to the masses, but something of a deeper kind, a strong sympathy with the spiritual ideals of his public. “On the other hand there is always a distinct reaction of the artist not only against every kind of collectivization, but against the changing of his own person, his work, and his ideology into an eternalization-symbol for a particular epoch. This resistance of the artist to his absorption into the community will show itself in more than his objection to success and fame; it will also influence his further activity so far as the assertion of his own individuality is concerned, and become a strong stimulus to further creativity in general. Certainly this will be the case with the great artist, who always 1 revival of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, Virgil the magician revived by Dante as the rationalist and Goethe as poet’s struggling soul, Luther as a pathological character revived to salvation, Shakespeare recognized as the nation’s poet after a century and a half, Goethe as a national hero, melancholy Mozart as lively imp, and van Gogh and his neuroses. 104 tries to escape this collectivizing influence by deliberate new creations, whereas the weaker talent succumbs to a conscious concession to the masses or becomes mere raw material for the collective perpetuation instinct. These diverse outcomes of the struggle of the artist against success and fame explain, too, why many of the greatest geniuses only attain fame after their own time, and, on the other hand, why mediocre gifts enjoy a seemingly undeserved success. A strong-willed creator lends himself far less to collective influence than a merely talented artist, whose work may easily be made the material for a mass creation that genius opposes. “But we see too in this matter of success and fame that the struggle of the artist against the art-ideology and his own creative dynamism is objectified and. becomes a struggle of the artist against the community of living men and against posterity. The struggle is carried on on both sides and is so obstinate because it is at bottom again that opposition of individual and community which was the original source of all artistic productivity. The individual artist wants to free himself by his own creativity from the spiritual immortality-idea of the community, while the recognition of his achievement manifested as fame, amounts to an incorporation of his own personality in that of the community. Thus general recognition of the artist and his work is the spiritual counterpart to his own asserted claim to be an artist; the latter is a gesture of independence, whereas fame, which is something granted to him, again makes him dependent. “Success stands, in a sense, half-way, since it is both deserved and won by the self, but leads easily to the fame which must be bestowed by others. This brings us also to the positive side of the whole problem, which we have hitherto kept in the background, because it could only be understood after considering the artist’s disinclination to fame. The assumption that the artist seeks only success and fame originates with the unproductive type, who may not only be eager for it himself, but also be actuated by a belief that the artist wants to become famous, whereas really he himself wants to make him famous so as to participate in his immortality. It would be an exaggeration, of course, to deny that the artist is attracted by success and fame but his motives are other than the motives of those who grant it to him. For the artist, success is a way of returning to life when the work is completed, and fame is a sort of collective after-existence which even the greatest cannot dispense With, since there is no more individual after-existence. The tragedy lies in the fact that the collective continuation of existence which every individual aims at extends in the artist’s case to a complete depersonalization in his work, or at least to its radical transformation into a collective product: in any case, leads far beyond the goal that the artist himself aimed at. Success gives him both, the individual justification of his work and its collective recognition, whereas fame stamps both himself and his work as a creature of the community. “These observations indicate that the desire for success and fame may at first act as a stimulus to the creative impulse, but that later, when the artist approaches success or has attained it, other social ideologies must take its place.” Mature artists, for example, might return to their early work for inspiration like how Goethe remarks about his repeated adolescences. “Here there is obviously a rejuvenation-wish, for fame has a flavour of death, and immortality is only distinguished by two small letters from the arch-evil they dread.” Collective assimilation is hostile to the artist. Success is a half-way promise to balance life and work, but fame represents a complete depersonalization. 105 “Bitterly, then, he finds out that success only strengthens the need for creating, and that fame, which is the end of it, leads to depersonalization during his lifetime and is of no use for life if it comes after death. The artist does not create, in the first place, for fame or immortality; his production is to be a means to achieve actual life, since it helps him to overcome fear. But he cannot get out of the bypath he has once trodden, which was to lead him back by means of his work to life. He is thus more and more deeply entangled in his creative dynamism, which receives its seal in success and fame. “But along with all these expressions of the opposition of the artist to art-ideology, to the dynamism of creation and the final absorption of his individual immortality by the community, there must exist other, and even stronger, tendencies of surrender, selfrenunciation, and self-sacrifice. These seem to be just as necessary for the artist as the tendencies of self-assertion and self-eternalization; and, indeed, we have had to assume that what is perhaps the most decisive part of creative dynamism originates in this conflict of opposing tendencies and their settlement in the harmony of the work. This conflict between self-assertion and self-surrender is a normal phenomenon in human psychical life, which in the artist is extraordinarily intensified and reaches gigantic, one might say macrocosmic heights. As the strong creative personality is driven to destroy a pre-existing ideology, instead of a mere individual, as his“building-sacrifice” before he may eternalize himself in a new one, the conflict between surrender and assertion, which otherwise takes place in relation to a person, is here manifested with society and its whole order as the player on the other side. “The artist therefore has to give himself the more and the more intensively and exhaustively in his work because he has created it the more independently of others. This seems at most a compensative justice, but is really only the result of a violent dynamism which wilfully alters a natural dependence of the individual into an apparent freedom in creation. Success and fame then supervene to assure the artist that for all his lordliness he is still dependent on the collective forces that he seeks to escape by autonomous creation. From our point of view, according to which an artist is made by the individual’s raising himself above nature and making himself eternal in his work, we might put it in this way: that success and fame make him once more a collective being, take him from his divine creative role and make him human again; in a word, make him mortal. However much he may like to return to earth and become human, he cannot do it at the price of his own immortality; and the paradox of the thing consists in the fact that success and fame, which make him collectively immortal, make him personally human once more and restore him to mortality. His work is taken from him by the community, as the child is taken from its parents, and in place of it he receives his title to fame, rewarded like a mother by a state hungry for soldiers. The artist, too, looks for this reward, but he hopes to return by his success to life, whereas fame condemns him often enough to spiritual death. “If success is the result of an irresistible dynamism which gives success to that artist who achieves it, fame is in the same way the result of an irresistible dynamism in a community which is always hungry for material for its own eternalization. Every group, however small or great, has, as such, an “individual” impulse for eternalization, which manifests itself in the creation of and care for national, religious, and artistic heroes. Yet this is impossible without the productive achievement of outstanding individuals, who then become the pioneers and victims of this collective immortality, whether they will it or not. In this sense success is a measure of the extent to which the individual paves the way for this collective eternity impulse; and fame might then be taken as an expression of regret on the part of the community which has annexed this man and his 106 work as its own.’ In spite of this guilt-feeling, however, the community really only takes back what genius, by using collective ideology, bad previously taken from it magnified, it is true, by the personal achievement of the creator. And this is the more important since the community annexes the man and his work, depersonalizes him, and thus really robs him of the fruit of his work-in return for which he is offered the distinction of fame. Success and fame thus complete not only the work of the artist, but, far more than that, a vast circle in the eternal conflict between individual and group. The individual tries, by taking over a collective ideology which he creates anew in the personal sense, to assure his own immortality, and this is manifested in success; but the community, by the bestowing of fame, annexes for itself the immortality which had really been won by an individual, makes itself eternal in the work, and offers the artist in return its collective glory.” 107 108 Chapter 14 Deprivation and Renunciation The individual becomes conscious of himself being this particular individual with particular gifts, tendencies, impulses, passions, under the influence of a particular environment, as a particular product of his milieu. He who becomes thus conscious of himself assumes all this as part of his own responsibility. At the moment of choice he is thus in complete isolation for he withdraws from his surroundings; and yet he is in complete continuity, for he chooses himself as product; and this choice is a free choice, so that we might even say, when he chooses himself as product, that he is producing himself. Kierkegaard “The last chapters have brought us back to the narrower problem with which we started, the relation of the artist to art; but permit us now to formulate it from the standpoint of the artist, whereas at first we had to do so from that of art. We started with the primitive art-forms of ornament and noted that their abstractness yet contained an element of the concrete which alone really made them works of art. For if they were nothing but abstraction, we should value philosophical ideas more highly than art and so return to the position of Greek thinkers, who identified beauty and truth and saw their ideal in the wise man and not in the inspired artist. The essence of art, however, lies precisely in the concrete representation of the abstract; and we tried to show why such a representation was thought beautiful and roused æsthetic pleasure. In order to understand primitive ornament we adduced, in addition to the personal 109 and social motives of the “artist,” the general ideology within which these forms were necessary or possible, and thence we found the first deduction of the concept of beauty from the concept of the soul. The primitive world-outlook rests on a collective ideology of the soul, which must in its nature be abstract to attain its object of supporting the belief in immortality. Primitive art is abstract, because it wants to, or must, represent this abstract idea of the soul as like as possible, in order that its actual existence may be proved by concretization. Whereas, then, primitive (and even later) religion supports the belief in immortality by a collective soul-ideology, art proves the existence of this abstract conception of the soul by its concretization in symbolical form. “We traced the development of art from its primitive beginnings to the personal masterpieces of Classical, Renaissance, and modern times, until we finally found in the individual artist himself a representative of the same ideology of immortality. Not only does his work become the most concrete proof that the individual can live on in spirit for centuries; but the last chapters have shown us how the artist is under a sort of organic compulsion to transform his art-ideology into experience. In this he makes reality of the unreal to just the extent that it represents the concretization of the soulconcept in the work. In other words, the artist must live his ideology so that he, as well as others, may believe in it as true; on the other hand, this ideological experience acts both as a means to make artistic productivity possible and as a means to live a real life. For we have seen that the basic conflict of the creative personality is that between his desire to live a natural life in an ordinary sense and the need to produce ideologically—which corresponds socially to that between individuality and collectivity and biologically to that between the ego and the genus. Whereas the average man largely subordinates himself, both socially and biologically, to the collective, and the neurotic shuts himself deliberately off from both, the productive type finds a middle way, which is expressed in ideological experience and personal creativity. But since the artist must live as a human being and yet feels compelled to make this transitory life eternal in an intransient work, a compromise is set up between ideologized life and an individualized creativity—a balance which is difficult, impermanent, and in all circumstances painful, since creation tends to experience, and experience again cries out for artistic form.” The difficult and painful balance Rank refers to is between the two notions of deprivation and renunciation that are the artist’s general problem. These two aspects are complementary, like outer and inner, society and ego, collective and individual because artists can no more entirely deprive themselves than they can completely reconcile themselves to life by rejecting art. Society supports an individual in their human response to this struggle, and the individual artist always advanced culture through ideological production. As this relation increasingly develops with an individual psychology, the boundary is disrupted for an artist who would use the ideologized life for individualized creativity. This contradiction leads Rank to speculate on how the creative urge might be employed by a strong individual to enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness. The artist experiences both a deprivation, associated with their creativity, and a renunciation, regarding their culture, and they cannot entirely do-away with either aspect. Great artists and great works demonstrate this in resolution, and some, Goethe and Ibsen, for example, even go-so-far in their maturity to philosophically reflect on this relation where their individual energy (in life) and support for their ambitions (in art) are both protected. “From this point of view discussions about life and creativity, the conflict of various modes of life and ideas of creativity, seem superficial. An artist who feels that he is 110 driven into creating by an external deprivation and who is then again obstructed by a longing for life can rise above these conflicts to a renunciant view of life which recognizes that it is not only impossible but perilous to live out life to the full and can, willingly and affirmatively, accept the limitations that appear in the form of moral conventions and artistic standards, not merely as such, but as protective measures against a premature and complete exhaustion of the individual. This means the end of all doubt as to whether he is to dedicate his whole life to art or send art to perdition and simply live; also of the question whether he is live a Bohemian life in accordance with his ideology or live an ordinary life in despite of his art; and in the end his creativity is not only made richer and deeper by this renunciatory attitude, but is freed from the need to justify one or the other mode of life in other words, form the need for compensation. “But this justifies a question as to whether such a human solution of the creative conflict may not have an, unfavourable influence either on the urge to create or at least on the quality of the work. A study, psychological and ideological, of the artist and the history of art certainly gives the impression that, as we said above, the great artist and his work are due to a forced justification or a strained over-compensation; but also that only the greatest artists at the end of this struggle reach a renunciatory philosophy.” The struggle toward resolution is painful, and it impacts the work as well as the individual. A balance at least was maintained between life and art as long as the two developed together. Creativity seems to be stimulated by a life that is not bourgeois, but the creative genius needs also at least an approximate life to avoid sterility. For the artist, these conflicts are self-created (or intensified if they already exist) just so that they can be resolved through art. Society likewise has always been willing to forgive the frenzied poet because that inspiration is not their own, just as Shakespeare was allowed to utter high treason through his characters. Society protects the artist’s ambitions as well as their energy, and the artist operates in the balance between their work and their life. This balance, albeit experienced as a struggle, was maintained in how the work, which uses the dominant ideology, was always more or less unconsciously pushed out from the creative individual to the receiving society. “But the more conscious the creative process becomes in the artist, the more the creative tendency is imperceptively and unnoticed being pushed back from the work to the artist himself from whom it originated. Only, primitively this self-creative tendency showed itself, as we saw, corporeally in body-ornament, whereas in the modern artist it ends with the psychical will-to-experience, his own art-ideology in full. This is, of course, impossible and brings the artist into all the conflicts which we may describe as neurotic, but which are not any the more intelligible for being so called. For these difficulties of the creative type show also that his true tendency is always towards actual life; as is shown also in the so-called realism or verism of modern art. This therefore discloses itself as the counterpart to the tendency, which has been mentioned earlier, to mould life in accordance with an artistic ideology, since the idea is now that art is to be made wholly true to life. But in this wise the boundaries between art and life are obliterated; each is to replace the other whereas formerly each complemented the other. In both spheres the movement from art to life is clear; but the creative men of our time are not capable of going the whole way and accepting the development of their personality as the truly creative problem. What hinders them is the same individual feeling of guilt which in earlier times was able, owing to the counter-force of religious submissiveness, to work itself out creatively, but nowadays limits both complete artistic creation and complete personality-development. 111 “For artistic creation has, in the course of its development, changed from a means for the furtherance of the culture of the community into a means for the construction of personality. But the more successful this is, the greater is the urge of this personality away from art towards life, which yet cannot be fully grasped. Our Western art has thus lost its old function in proportion as this movement (beginning perhaps with the Renaissance) from the collective to the individual increased.” The artist can no longer self-create on an individual basis the social and spiritual attitude of the old group ideologies. Art for arts sake is therefore justified, but it cannot save the individual soul because the collective belief is committed to an individual psychology; Rank felt that even poetry in his day was turning into a type of realistic talk with psychological expression of intellectual thought rather than a creative expression of the spiritual. “But the reality which modern art seeks to reproduce cannot be represented in language, and other traditional forms are suited only to the creative form of the spiritual and not to a realistic expression of the actual. That is why the film and talking film have become the most popular art, because this art reproduces the real faithfully, and the more so, the more it progresses.” This makes me wonder what Rank would say about our current culture with modern stars like Warhol, Dylan, or Kubrick. Rank does not deny there are still great artists who can use the old forms or breathe new spirit into old forms. “But in both cases I feel that the modern artist has to buy his success too dearly, since he feels either like a believer among unbelievers or like the founder of a new religion who is persecuted and scorned by the members of the old religion. This comparison with religious conflicts comes naturally to us; for just as there is a continuous increase in the number of the irreligious and at the same time an enhanced need for substitutes for the old belief in the gods, so the art manias of modern society, with the over-valuing of the artist, indicate a decline of real artistic vigour, which is only speciously covered over by the last flicker of a snobbish enthusiasm. It is certain that artists nowadays do not create for the people, but for a few exclusive groups, particularly of intellectuals who feel themselves artists. With an increasing individualization art-forms also must become more individual so that they suit the ideology of a few small groups, and no attempt to exalt artists into national heroes can conceal the fact that there are ever fewer artists of really national importance and still fewer of international.” This is the breakup of the collective function of art and its democratization. Strong individuals can all now feel that an artist lies somewhere within themselves. A strong personality is necessary for art, but not every strong personality needs to develop as an artist. Rank has shown, in earlier chapters, how art even works, beyond a certain point, to impede personal development. This is not simply due to the outward pressure and deprivation from a mechanistic society, but also an individual feeling that artistic creation is an unsatisfactory substitute for real life. The conflict between life and creation that was resolved in a psychic struggle of utmost importance is now a social problem with no harmonious reconciliation as life becomes more technical and the members of a community become more separate as individuals. Artists have always served two masters; they are both self-confident and productive, and they live a life of sacrifice which they must ultimately accept. This leads to the “artiste manqu´e” type that Rank first recognized as related to the neurotic. 112 “The neurotic is himself a symptom of the modern conflict between the individual and society, a conflict which might in other ages have been productively surmounted in artistic creation. Nowadays the old art-Ideology is no longer, and the new personalityidea not yet, strong enough to admit of either solution for the individual impulse to create. Everyone suffers—individual, community, and, not least, art as an ideological expression of their interrelation. “Everything seems to drive us to the conclusion that we are at one of those crises in human history, in which once again we must sacrifice one thing if we want the full enjoyment of another. If we look back at the modern artist-type as we know it, even in biographical form, since Renaissance days, there can be no doubt that the great works of art were bought at the cost of ordinary living. Whatever our attitude towards this fact and interpretation of this fact, it is at least certain that the modern individualist must give up this kind of artistic creation if he is to live as vigorously as is apparently necessary. Not only are the two things incompatible, in terms of soul and of energy, but there seems to be a spiritual law whereby nothing can be wholly won or enjoyed without something being given up or sacrificed for it. From the fabulous ring of Polycartes, who tried to buy his good fortune from heaven, down to the neurotic feeling of guilt, with its apparent self-punishment, we see this compensatory principle operating in the relation of individual to society. The individual, it seems, cannot permanently endure one sort of condition even if it be happiness because he immediately loses a part of the full humanity which is needed for his real personality. Where happiness and misery are concerned the individual is clearly controlling his own destiny by meeting good and ill fortune halfway ere it can surprise him. “If there are really these two incommensurable magnitudes, such as supreme art and full experience seem to be, the conflict can only end with the surrender of the one to the other. But as long as this involves a feeling of sacrifice, there is no real solution, rather an intensification of the conflict, for the responsibility is always laid on an external deprivation which is to be fought against. Only a full renunciation, such as a few great artists have achieved despite their natural inclinations, can overcome this feeling of sacrifice so that surrender means, not an imposed necessity, but a freely chosen decision. This turning-point in the life of the individual artist has also become a secular crisis of our age, in which we have to see that the surrender of traditional forms no longer means a loss to us, but a liberation of creative force from the chains of old ideologies. Now, our previous conclusions show that this creative impulse can be set free from artistic ideologies, because it is not irrevocably bound thereto as an artideology is obliged to assume. We have seen that the impulse was originally directed towards the body and only gradually was objectified in collective art-forms. On the other hand we see modern individuals, particularly the neurotic, striving once more to direct this creative instinct towards the ego in order to make it more useful and efficient for life. The fact that the neurotic at present fails in face of his problem cannot diminish his pioneer achievement- if he seeks his salvation in artistic creation instead of in the development of his own personality, it is because he is still in the toils of old art-ideologies. The many forms of psycho-therapy, psychoanalysis included, cannot free him from the dilemma, since they either try to restore him to the normal or force him to a false artistry instead of allowing to develop a true form of himself. “The new type of humanity will only become possible when we have passed beyond this psycho-therapeutic transitional stage, and must grow out of those artists themselves who have achieved a renunciant attitude towards artistic production. A man with creative power who can give up artistic expression in favour of the formation of 113 personality- since he can no longer use art as an expression of an already developed personality will remould the self-creative type and will be able to put his creative impulse directly in the service of his own personality. In him the wheel will have turned full circle, from primitive art, which sought to raise the physical ego out of nature, to the voluntaristic art of life, which can accept the psychical ego as a part of the universe. But the condition of this is the conquest of the fear of life, for that fear has led to the substitution of artistic production for life, and to the eternalization of the all-too-mortal ego in a work of art. For the artistic individual has lived in art-creation instead of actual life, letting his work live or die on its own account, and has never wholly surrendered himself to life. In place of his own self the artist puts his objectified ego into his work, but though he does not save his subjective mortal ego from death, he yet withdraws himself from real life. And the creative type who can renounce this protection by art and can devote his whole creative force to life and the formation of life will be the first representative of the new human type, and in return for this renunciation will enjoy, in personality-creation and expression, a greater happiness.” Figure 14.1: The End 114