Against Interpretation--Brief Summary

Susan Sontag

 

In ancient times, Man experienced art as incantation. Art was an instrument of ritual.  The Greeks proposed the earliest theory of art. Art is an imitation of reality ( mimesis).

The mimetic theory wanted art ‘to justify itself’. Art had to prove its value. Plato believed that art had no value. Even the best ‘painting’ of a bed is only an 'imitation of an imitation' and useless for practical purposes. Aristotle, the disciple of Plato, modified the theory of imitation. Aristotle said art was just ‘imitation’, not an ‘imitation of an imitation’.  He claimed that art has therapeutic value. ‘Art is useful …medicinally in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions’ (Catharsis).

Sontag argues that ‘all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art … remained within the confines of mimesis or representation.' That theory made art ‘problematic’ and ‘in need of defence.' The defence gave birth to the dichotomy between form and content, asserting that ‘content’ was essential and ‘form’ was an accessory.

 

Today, many critics discard mimesis. They prefer the theory of art as a subjective expression of personal perspectives. However, the main features of the mimetic theory have not disappeared. Today, the content of a work of art receives much attention.

 

We cannot return to the age when there were no literary theories and no need for art to justify itself. Then, nobody asked what a work of art said because one knew what it did. Sontag regrets that, till the end of consciousness, we have to go on defending art.

 

Content has become a 'hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle ...philistinism.' Content initiates a ‘perennial’ and never-completed project of interpretation. According to Sontag, interpretation is ‘a conscious act of the mind which illustrates a code and “rules” of interpretation’. ‘The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreters read their meanings into the work of art. Interpretation, in effect, transforms a work of art.

 

Interpretation began in the ‘culture of late classical antiquity’ when scientific development destroyed myth's ‘power and credibility'. The progress of science made it impossible to accept ancient texts in their 'pristine form'. The seemliness of the religious symbols became questionable. ‘Then, interpretation became necessary to reconcile the ancient texts to modern demands.

 

Sontag cites the examples of the Stoic philosophers, who, to make their Gods moral, ‘allegorized away the rude features’ of Zeus and his unruly clan. They explained that the depiction of the adultery of Zeus and Leto (Homer) was not adultery but ‘the union of power and wisdom’. Similarly, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal, historical narrative of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms.

 

We can see from the examples cited above that there is a clear difference between the meaning of the text and the demands of later readers. Interpretation tries to solve the difference. The text has become unacceptable (for some reason), but we cannot discard it. Here, interpretation becomes a ‘radical strategy’. We defend the text through an acceptable interpretation. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. However, he cannot admit to doing this. He claims to make it intelligible by disclosing its true meaning. The interpretation may be very far from the original meaning of the text. However, the interpreter will claim to be ‘reading of a sense that is already there’ in the text. The Rabbinic and Christian spiritual interpretations of the erotic Song of Songs provide ‘a notorious example’, says Sontag.

 

Today, interpretation is more complex. It is prompted not by ‘piety toward the troublesome text’ but due to an ‘overt contempt for appearances’.  ‘The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one’.

 

Sontag says that the doctrines of Marx and Freud offer us examples of interpretation as excavation. Their doctrines rest on ‘elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation’.

 

Marx and Freud classify all ‘observable phenomena’ as ‘manifest content’. The ‘manifest content’ is ‘probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning--the latent content beneath’.

 

Marx treated all social events as revolutions and wars as occasions for interpretations. Freud considered all neurotic symptoms, slips of the tongue, and texts as cases for interpretation. Both believed that the events ‘only seem to be intelligible’. They have no meaning without interpretation. ‘To understand is to interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon, in effect, to find an equivalent for it.’

 

Sontag regrets that the ‘project of interpretation’ has become ‘reactionary and stifling’. She compares interpretation to the fumes of automobiles and heavy industry that pollute our atmosphere. The effusion of interpretations pollutes our art and ‘poisons our sensibilities’. Our culture already suffers, Sontag feels, from ‘the hypertrophy of the intellect’ gained at the expense of ‘energy and sensual capability’.

 

Interpretation is ‘the revenge of the intellect upon the world.’ ‘To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world… to set up a shadow world of “meanings”. ‘Our world is already ‘depleted and impoverished’. Interpretation duplicates our world. We must keep it away. Let us experience (more immediately) what we have.

 

The philistinism of interpretation is more rampant in literature than in any other art. Literary critics assume that their task is to transform a poem, play, or novel into something different. The works of Kafka have been subjected to mass ravishment by armies of interpreters. They read them as social allegories, as studies of frustrations and insanity, or as religious allegories. Samuel Beckett's works have attracted interpreters like leeches. They read the works as statements about alienation from meaning or from God or as allegories of psychopathology.

 

 

Sontag points out another subtle aspect of interpretation. She says interpretation ‘indicates a dissatisfaction with the work’, a wish to replace it with something else. Sontag recommends methods to escape the tyranny of interpretation. She says that ‘a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation’. Sometimes, art becomes a ‘parody’ to avoid interpretation, or it may become abstract, decorative, or non-art.

 

‘Abstract painting is the attempt to have …no content; since there is no content, there can be no interpretation’. Pop art takes the opposite means to escape interpretation. Here, the content is so blatant that interpretation becomes unnecessary. Much modern poetry attempts to bring back ‘the magic’ of words to escape ‘the rough grip of interpretation’.

 

Avant-gardism provides no lasting defence against ‘interpretation’. It will force art to be ‘perpetually on the run’. It also perpetuates the distinction between ‘form’ and ‘content’. The ideal defence against interpretation is to make art ‘unified’, ‘clean’,  and with ‘rapid momentum’. ‘The address of the work is direct. The work can be just what it is. Films employ this method. ‘In good films, there is always a directness that frees us from the itch to interpret’. Sontag points out that many old Hollywood films have ‘this liberating anti-symbolic quality’.

 

Sontag believes that films do not face the problem of interpretation due to ‘the newness of cinema as an art’. Films were also part of mass culture, as opposed to high culture, and were largely ignored by most people. ‘Then, too, there is always something other than content in the cinema to grab hold of for those who want to analyze. The cinema (unlike the novel) possesses a vocabulary of forms—the explicit, complex, and discussable technology of camera movements, cutting, and composition of the frame that goes into filmmaking.

 

Sontag shares her ideas about the desirable kind of criticism.  The first thing we have to do is to pay attention to ‘form’ in art. Undue stress on ‘content’ leads to ‘arrogance of interpretation’. The stress on ‘content’ must be replaced with ‘more extended and more thorough descriptions of form’. To achieve this, we need a ‘vocabulary’ for forms. The best criticism, says Sontag, is that which ‘dissolves considerations of content into those of form’.

 

Unfortunately, we do not have a ‘poetics’ of the novel. We do not have a clear idea about the forms of narration. Film criticism, Sontag hopes, will lead us to a better understanding of the novel form.

 

Concluding her arguments, Sontag writes about ‘transparence’, the most liberating value in art and criticism. She defines ‘transparence’ thus: ‘Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are’.

 

Once, writers created works of art to be experienced on multiple levels. Today, it is unwelcome because redundancy has become ‘the principal affliction of modern life’. Once, interpreting works of art was ‘revolutionary and creative’. Now we do not need to assimilate Art into Thought, or… Art into Culture.

‘Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience.’ All the conditions of modern life ‘dull our sensory faculties’. We have to recover our senses. ‘We must learn to see more...hear more... feel more.' We must not ‘squeeze more content out of the work than is already there’. Our aim should be to reduce the content so that we can experience the work of art. ‘The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art. [1559]

Revised on 28/01/26

Dr. S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor of English, Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore-18.

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian universities. They are meant to provide guidance and do not substitute for the original texts. Students must make sure to read the original works. The writer hopes to support students from underdeveloped areas of our country.

 

 

 

                                     Politics and the English Language—A Brief Analysis

George Orwell

 

The English language is at present in a ‘bad way’.  Many people feel helpless to do anything about it. The decline (of a language) has political and economic causes, and no individual writer is responsible for the degeneration.

Language becomes ‘ugly and inaccurate’ when thoughts are foolish. The language's untidiness makes it easy to have silly ideas. Orwell feels ‘the process is reversible’; we must avoid ‘bad’ language habits and think more clearly.

Orwell provides us with five modern ‘specimens of the English language.' Each has faults. They are also ugly. They have two common qualities: ‘staleness of imagery’ and ‘lack of precision’. ‘The writer… has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else’.

This ‘mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose’. Modern prose consists of words chosen not for their meaning. The phrases are ‘tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.'

Prose writers employ various tricks to avoid the difficulties of prose construction.

Dying metaphors.

A newly invented metaphor evokes a visual image. A dead metaphor (e.g. iron resolution) has become a common word. Then, there is a ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors’ with no evocative power. Orwell provides examples: 

 

Ring the changes on, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, and hotbed.

 

People use them without understanding their meaning or ‘turning them out’ of their original sense.

 

Operators / verbal false limbs. 

These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns and pad each sentence with extra syllables that provide (an appearance of) symmetry. Orwell provides us with examples:

 

Render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, 

 

The significant feature here is the elimination of simple verbs. [Render inoperative = halt, stop, arrest, disable, Militate against = avert, oppose, reverse, discredit, Give rise to = produce, cause, generate, engender]

 

Additionally, the passive voice is used wherever possible, in preference to the active; noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining), and banal statements get an appearance of profundity through the 'not un- formation'.

 

Orwell laughs at the last-mentioned through a humorous example: "A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field".

 

Pretentious diction. 

Pretentious diction dresses up a simple statement and gives ‘an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements.’ 

Examples: 

Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as a noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, and liquidate. 

Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, and inevitable try to dignify the sordid process of international politics. 

Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance.

Jargons like a hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, and White Guard originate from Russian, German, or French. It is easier to create words of this kind than to think of English words that will cover the meaning. However, that results in increased 'slovenliness and vagueness.'

 

Meaningless words. 

In art/literary criticism, we get “long passages ...almost completely lacking in meaning”.

Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, and vitality (as used in art criticism) are meaningless.

The same is true with political words. ‘The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’

Words like democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotism, realism, and justice have many different meanings (which cannot agree with one another).

After providing a list of ‘swindles and perversions’, Orwell gives another example of the writing they lead us. He translates a passage from Ecclesiastes into modern English (of the ‘worst sort’).  

I returned and saw under the Sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Orwell compares the two passages and marks the following points:

 

·       The concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread—(of the first) dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’ (in the second). We expect this from a modern writer who uses expressions like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’. Modern prose tends to move away from concreteness.

·       ‘The first contains forty-nine words (but) only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin and one from Greek.

·       ‘The first sentence contains six vivid images and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and (with) its ninety syllables, it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet undoubtedly, it is the second kind that gains ground in modern English.

·       Modern writing does not pick out words for their meaning and invent images to make the meaning clear. It strings together long strips of words already set in order by someone else. The attraction of this way of writing is its ease.

·       With ready-made phrases, we need not hunt about for the words; we also need not bother with the rhythms of the sentences. The ‘stale metaphors, similes, and idioms’ leave the meaning vague but save much mental strain.

·       ‘The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. By using mixed metaphors—‘the Fascist octopus has sung its swan song’ — the ‘writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words, he is not....thinking.’

 

Orwell points out what a scrupulous writer will do in every sentence he writes. Such a one will ask himself at least four questions, thus:

• 1. What am I trying to say?
• 2. What words will express it?
• 3. What image or idiom will make it clear?
• 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

And he will probably ask himself two more:

• 1. Could I put it more shortly?
• 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

 

Politics and the Debasement of Language.     

At this point, Orwell explains, “the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear”. It is “broadly true that political writing is bad writing.” It demands a “lifeless, imitative style”. The writing may “vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech”.

When watching some tired hack on the platform (mechanically) repeating phrases like bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder, one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some ....dummy.

“And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine”. The appropriate sounds are coming from his larynx. However, his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself.  “This reduced state of consciousness… is at any rate favourable to political conformity”.

When political speech and writing try to defend the indefensible-- “the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan”, the language “has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness”.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between.... real and.... declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink”.

Orwell believes the German, Russian, and Italian languages have deteriorated in the previous ten or fifteen years (because of dictatorships). He feels that the corruption of language is “curable”.  

Some silly words and expressions have disappeared owing to the “conscious action of a minority”. (Two recent examples are: "to explore every avenue" and "leave no stone unturned").

These expressions disappeared because of “the jeers of a few journalists”. We can also avoid “flyblown metaphors”.

It is possible to reduce the number of Latin and Greek words in the average sentence. We can drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words and make pretentiousness unfashionable.

 

What is needed to defend the English language?

What is needed is to let “the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around”. In prose, the worst thing is to surrender to words. Probably it is better to “put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations”. But one may need reliable rules. Orwell thinks the following rules will cover most cases:

 

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or another figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

 

In conclusion, Orwell comments that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. “One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's habits, and from time to time” one can even send some “worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or another lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.

 [1743]

Revised on 28/01/26

Dr. S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor of English, Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore-18.

Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian universities. They are meant to provide guidance and do not substitute for the original texts. Students must make sure to read the original works. The writer hopes to support students from underdeveloped areas of our country.

 

 

                                                          Psychology and Literature

(Abridged)

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

 

Psychology, Jung says, is the study of the psychic process. ‘Human psyche is the womb of all sciences and art’. Psychological research tries to explain the formation of a work of art by studying: i) the Creative process and ii) the Creative artist.

A work of art is a complicated product, created intentionally and consciously. When we analyze the creative process, we undertake the psychological analysis of a work of art. We consider the creative artist as a unique personality. It is possible to make surmises about the artist from his work and conversely. But the inferences are never conclusive.

1. The work of art [the creative process]

There is one difference between the psychologist’s and the literary critic’s examination of a "literary" work. What is significant to the former may be irrelevant to the latter, and vice versa. Take, for example, the psychological novel. The psychologist may not prefer it, as he has very little to explain since it explains itself. The most fruitful novels (for the psychologist) are those in which the author has not provided interpretation. Such works leave ample room for analysis and explanation.

Novels with hidden assumptions pose challenges to the psychologist, as he alone can analyse their deeper meaning. To illustrate this distinction, Jung discusses Goethe’s Faust.

In the first part, the drama explains itself. The poet has stated everything clearly. The psychologist has nothing more to add. But the picture changes when we come to the second part. Here, nothing is self-explanatory. Every line increases the challenges, making it hard for the reader to understand without further explanation.

Jung calls the first type of artistic creation psychological, where everything is explained clearly, so that the psychologist has no task to perform.

The second type of artistic creation is called visionary. Here, the work is endowed with deep meaning, and the psychologist must strive hard to decipher the meaning. The reader may miss the significance of the materials unless the psychologist points it out.

The Psychological mode

It deals with materials taken from ordinary human consciousness. The poet’s work is an interpretation and illumination of the contents of the human mind. He leaves nothing to the psychologist to explain. No obscurity surrounds the materials as they fully expound themselves. Such works never exceed the boundaries of psychology. All the experiences pictured in them belong to the realm of the understandable.

The Visionary mode

This mode reverses all the conditions of the former. The experiences are no longer familiar but strange, and these originate "from the hinterland" of the human mind. Jung qualifies this mode as something that tears from top to bottom the curtain upon which there is the picture of an ordered world.

We find this vision in Dante, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner, and William Blake. The visionary model of artistic creation astonishes and shocks us, compelling us to seek commentaries and explanations to grasp its meaning and intent.

Examples of the visionary.

The Shepherd of Hermas, The Divine Comedy, and Faust

In all three works, the visionary experience takes precedence over love. Here, the vision is not derived or secondary, nor is it merely a symptom of something else. Instead, it stands as a genuine symbolic expression. The subject thus transcends human passion.

Human enlightenment is born out of fear. In the daytime, Man believes in an ordered cosmos. He tries to maintain faith against the fear of the chaos that besets him by night.

The Night Side of Life.

The seers, prophets, leaders, and enlighteners were familiar with the nocturnal world. Man has known of it from time immemorial. For primitive man, it is an unquestionable part of his picture of the cosmos. We have repudiated it because of our fear of superstition and metaphysics. We want an ordered world that is safe and manageable. ‘But even in our midst, the poet now and then catches sight of the figures of the night-world. He sees something of the psychic world that strikes terror into the savage and barbarian.

For the poet, the primordial experience is a source of creativity. His poetry cannot exhaust the possibilities of the vision but falls far short in richness of content. Psychology can bring together materials for comparison and offer terminology for discussion. The Collective Unconscious is part of the terminology.

Collective Unconscious

Jung defines the Collective Unconscious thus:

"We mean by Collective Unconscious, a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity; from it, consciousness has developed".

Jung says that in the structure of our body, we find "traces of earlier stages of evolution". In "eclipses of consciousness--in dreams, narcotic states, and cases of insanity,  there come to the surface psychic products or contents that show all the traits of primitive levels of psychic development".

"Great poetry draws its strength from the life of mankind, and we completely miss its meaning if we try to derive it from personal factors."

When the "collective unconscious becomes a living experience," it influences the "conscious outlook of an age", and the event becomes a creative act important to everyone living in that Age.

A work of art is a message to generations of men. "Faust touches something in the soul of every German". "An epoch is like an individual." It has its limitations of conscious outlook. It requires “a compensatory adjustment” that the collective unconscious provides.

II. The Poet

Creativity contains a secret. Creative man is a riddle that we may try to answer in various ways, but always in vain, a truth that has not prevented modern psychology from turning now and again to the question of the artist and his art. Freud thought that the key to a work of art is in the experiences of the artist. Jung agrees that a work of art, like neurosis, can be traced back to the knots in psychic life. The role of the psychic disposition of the poet in his work of art is undeniable.

Art and Neurosis

Neurosis is a substitute for gratification. A work of art is close to neurosis as it expresses the poet’s repressions. Thus, it is close to religion and philosophy.

We cannot claim that a work of art is neurosis. ‘The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential. The "more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is to a question of art."  A work of art should rise above personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet. The "particular" is a limitation, and even a sin, in the realm of art. A purely personal art has to be considered neurotic.

There is some truth in the belief of the Freudian school that artists are ‘narcissists’. The term implied that artists are undeveloped personalities with infantile and auto-erotic qualities. Jung says that this description is valid for the artist as a person. It has nothing to do with the man as an artist. In his capacity as an artist, he is neither auto-erotic, nor hetero-erotic, nor erotic in any sense. ‘He is objective and impersonal—-even inhuman—-for as an artist, he is his work and not a human being.

Every creative person is a duality of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side, he is a human being with personal life, while on the other, he is an impersonal, creative process. As a human being, he may be healthy or morbid. We can only understand him as an artist by looking at his creative achievements.

Jung explains his views of the artist thus:

The artist is under an overload of “collective psychic life," as opposed to the personal. "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him".

‘As a human being,  the artist may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist, he is a man in a higher sense—he is a collective man—, one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of Mankind. To perform this difficult task, he has to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.’

Two forces are at war in the life of the artist.

i) The ordinary human being longing for happiness, satisfaction, and security in life, and ii) someone with a ruthless passion for creation that may go so far as to override every personal desire.

Jung believes that an artist suffers because of the divine gift of creative fire in him. Each human being is born with a capital of energy. The stronger force will seize and monopolize this energy, leaving so little for other activities.

The auto-eroticism of the artist resembles that of illegitimate or neglected children. These children protect themselves from the destructive influence of people who have no love to give them. They develop bad qualities for defence against others and ‘maintain an invincible egocentrism by remaining all their lives infantile and helpless or by actively offending against the moral code or the law’. Art explains the artist. The deficiencies and conflicts in his personal life are not significant.

It does not matter whether the artist knows that his work is born, grows, and matures with him or that he produces it from the void. His opinion does not change the truth that his work outgrows him as a child outgrows its mother.

Human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious, as opposed to the active will. The conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current. It becomes nothing more than an observer of events. The work in progress becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust who creates Goethe.

Faust is a symbol that lives in the soul of every German. Goethe has helped to bring it to birth. Faust and Also Spake Zarathustra play upon something in the German soul. It is a ‘primordial image’ of the physician or teacher of Mankind, the archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, that lies in the human unconscious since the dawn of civilization. People need a guide, teacher, or even a physician to restore the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.

The work of a poet meets the spiritual needs of the society in which he lives. It means more to him than his fate; he is subordinate to his work. He has given it form and must leave the interpretation to others and the future.

"A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness, it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal".

[1795]

 

 

THANK YOU

Dr S. Sreekumar, Retd. Professor, Govt. Arts College, Coimbatore-18

Revised —27/01/26

     Disclaimer 

All the essays in this blog are for the undergraduate and postgraduate students of Indian Universities. They do not substitute the originals.  The students must necessarily go through the original texts. The writer hopes to help the students from the underdeveloped areas of our country.