PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE
55
so much in love with art that he tries to "possess" it-to include it in
his personal experience, which means to increase his power of en–
joyment and understanding, and thereby of instruction to others. But
as Ernst Kris has pointed out, the rise of a wholly "esthetic" atti–
tude toward life-I should call it pseudo-esthetic in effect-is an at–
tempt to appropriate not the work of art itself, which does exist so
that we may possess it, but the artist himself. It exists so as to give
us "status" and "prestige" in a world where the old bourgeois claims
of money and social position, though they support the life of art,
are felt not to be as real in advancing one's prestige as creativity it–
self. And the myth of creativity, the endless search for it in modern
times, is simply a search for identity on the part of people who believe
that they can find it in an experience, that of the real creator, utterly
foreign to themselves.
I could go on here to speak of many related aspects; of "taste,"
of corruption, of the demonstrable fact that while psychoanalysis has
added nothing to the creation of art, it has added a great deal, per–
haps too much, to our modern concern with art. But in conclusion
it is more important to note that the most signal fact about our ex–
perience today is that it is utterly unprecedented. The protagonist of
middle-class literature, from Goethe to Thomas Mann, from Blake
to D. H. Lawrence, from Rousseau to Proust, naturally saw life as
a struggle against convention. Under the slogan of nature as freedom
and truth, man saw himself as a hero reuniting man to the natural
destiny of which he had been robbed by the gods.
If
there had been
no profound tradition of repression, no moral code to bind us, Don
Juan could never have been a hero or Anna Karenina a heroine;
there would have been no guilt to suffer and no rebellion to honor.
But the great human symbol of contemporary literature, I suggest, is
no longer the rebel, since there is no authoritative moral tradition
that he can honestly feel limits and hinders his humanity. It is the
stranger-who seeks not to destroy the moral order, but to create
one that will give back to him the idea of humanity.
