ART AND NEUROSIS
47
and even for mediocrity, we have most of society involved in neurosis.
To this I have no objection; I think most of society is indeed involved
in neurosis. But with neurosis accounting for so very much, it can no
longer account for one man's literary power.
2) The second objection is concerned with the complete iden–
tification of the writer's fantasies with his power of expressing them.
Let us grant, for argument's sake, that the creative writer, as distin–
guished frorn other men, is the victim of a "mutilation" and that his
fantasies are neurotic.* But must we then say, as if it were an inevitable
next step, that his ability to express them and to impress us with them
is neurotic?-for that ability is what we mean by
his
powers. Any–
one might be injured as Henry James was and even have the other
and less gross similarities to his situation, and yet not have his power.
The Philoctetes story has its very great interest, but as a myth
it is deficient in that it does not suggest explanation.
It
makes no
causal connection between the wound and the bow. And if we look
into the matter, we see that there
is
no connection in fact between
them. Indeed, still granting the poet to be neurotic, what is surely
not neurotic-what, indeed, suggests nothing but health- is the power
· of controlling and using his neuroticism. He shapes his fantasies,
he gives them social form and reference.** Again supposing the writer
*
I am using the word "fantasy," unless modified, in a neutral sense. A
fantasy, in this sense, may be distinguished from the representation of something
that actually exists, but it is not opposed to "reality" and not an "escape" from
reality. Thus, the idea of a rational society, or the
imag~
of a good house to be
built, or the story of something
tha~
never happened, is a fantasy. There may be
neurotic or un-neurotic fantasies.
**
Charles Lamb, whose criticism is sadly underestimated, has made the
classic statement on this subject. He is denying that genius is "allied" to insanity;
for "insanity" and its manifestations the modern reader will of course substitute
"neurosis" and what is characteristic of it. "The ground of the mistake is, that
men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to
which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious re–
semblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to
the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his
subject, but has dominion over it . . . Where he seems most to recede from ·
humanity, he will be found the truest to it. From beyond the scope of Nature
if he summon possible existences, he subjugates them to the law of her con–
sistency. He is beautifully loyat to that sovereign directress, even when he appears
most to betray and desert her ... Herein the great and the little wits are1dif–
ferenced; that if the latter wander ever so little from nature or actual existence,;
they lose themselves and their readers . . . They do not create, which implies
shaping and consistency. Their imaginations are not active-for to be active is
to call something into act and form-but passive, as men in sick dreams."-"Sani–
ty of True Genius."
