PARTISAN REVIEW
soul-separable from him in the same way and exposed to all the
same risks and terrors.
No wonder primitive men attempt to defend their shadows against
being trodden on or struck; no wonder they avoid gazing at their own
reflections in pools and mirrors; no wonder they threaten and some–
times assault the civilized visitors who try
to
paint their portraits or
take their pictures with cameras. And perhaps it is not surprising that
vestiges of these beliefs have survived among the peasantry of Europe
and in remote comers of America even into our own time. Nor is it
odd that the Gothic, the Romantic imagination, which re-evoked
and (so to say) transliterated so much of the imagery of folklore,
should have found itself peculiarly captivated by the symbol of the
portrait- the symbol that fused in one whole the beauty and the
grace of the civilized aesthetic and the darkness, the fearfulness, the
primordial anxieties of an immemorial conviction. We literate mod–
ems have no conscious belief whatever in a Separable Soul; most of
us do not even know that our forebears once had such a belief; but
the notion is by no means so far behind us as we should like to sup–
pose. It joins hands, moreover, with an awareness which each of us
does have in some degree or other, the awareness that our individu–
ality is very far from being the simple unity it superficially appears
to be, that just below the surface we are divided, confused, multi–
farious, and discordant, and that we do indeed have other selves, if
not separable selves, besides the self in whose name we legally func–
tion. The uncanny ambiguousness of being an individual- the sense
of this is a sense which, on the irrational level, primitive man and
modem man share between them, and for both of them it is a per–
plexity and a source of pain. Of this perilous dualism or multiplicity
the romantic portrait is an admirable symbol.
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