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The Wellsprings of Literary Creation: An Analysis of Male and Female “Artist Stories” from the German Romantics to American Writers of the Present

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SOURCE: Mahlendorf, Ursula R. Introduction to The Wellsprings of Literary Creation: An Analysis of Male and Female “Artist Stories” from the German Romantics to American Writers of the Present, pp. xii-xx. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1985.

[In the following introduction to Mahlendorf's book-length examination of the künstlerroman, she surveys the ways in which the künstlerroman can be studied psychologically.]

A Künstlernovelle and Künstlerroman (artist story and artist novel) contains the creation of a work of art as a central event of its plot. Based on the creative work and psychology of a fictitious sculptor, painter, poet or musician, “artist stories” have fascinated German authors and readers continuously since the Romantics of the early 19th century.1 Under German Romantic influence, American writers, beginning with Hawthorne in The Artist of the Beautiful (1844) have shared this fascination. Despite Günther Grass's devastating parody in The Tin Drum (1959) the genre in German letters is far from exhausted, as Christa Wolf's sensitive A Model Childhood (1977) has shown. Recent evidence of the continuing vogue in American letters are Philip Roth's novella The Ghost Writer published in the New Yorker (June/July, 1979) with allusions to Thomas Mann's artists and John Irving's best-seller The World According to Garp (1976) with direct echoes of so unlikely (and misunderstood) a work as Franz Grillparzer's artist story The Poor Fiddler (1842).

Why does the artist figure appeal even to a non-literary audience? Fictionalized artist biographies like Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy provide participation in a richer life, insight into works of genius and the mysteries of their conception and birth. Biographies of well-known artists also cater to popular hunger for access to the secret of greatness, always enthralling to the imagination. Artist stories, though less sensational, appeal to similar curiosities. But they usually deal with imaginary or little-known artists and their plot accords with the writer's personal vision of the meaning of artistic existence and the origins of artistic achievement.

In the following chapters, I will analyze seven artist stories in depth. Throughout this study, I will use the words art and artist as generic terms and as equivalents for the German words Kunst and Künstler. This usage reflects a central thesis of this book: that early childhood creativity expresses itself in many ways, and is not limited to a specific gift, medium, or activity. In the course of development, the future artist may come to prefer a specific medium, art form, or sense modality. But an artist may retain the flexibility of childhood. Some of the writers we will discuss practiced two, or even three arts, although they became celebrated for only one; several settled on writing late in life. E.g., Hoffmann was a musician until his mid thirties though he had been sketching and writing since boyhood. He turned to writing because it paid him better than music and he used his sketches to illustrate his tales.

The studies comprising this volume began more than ten years ago from two entirely different points. When I read Freud's essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny, 1919), it struck me that Freud's interpretation of Hoffmann's The Sandman did not consider the fact that the hero was an artist. To my mind, Hoffmann's making his hero a poet was crucially important. This led me to look at Hoffmann's theory of artistic creation and its reflection in his work as a whole. Further study of The Sandman brought up general questions about creativity. What function, for example, did Hoffmann attribute to literary creation in an artist's life, in theorizing (letters, essays, autobiographical accounts) and in his fiction? What emotional, psychosocial and intellectual development did he ascribe to his artist protagonist between childhood and maturity? When and why did his creative career begin?

An essay of mine on Mann's Doctor Faustus arose from curiosity about the psychological meaning of music to Mann's protagonist. As I worked on these and other studies on the artist figure,2 I began reading widely on theories of creativity. It seemed to me that, in general, social scientists (psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, sociologists, philosophers) distrust, and therefore dismiss, attempts by writers and artists to explain the creative process. Nietzsche's half-joking comment in Zarathustra best summarizes the attitude: “… poets lie too much.” Writers and artists, in their turn, distrust the scientists, fearing that psychological questions may trivialize or invalidate their work, and meet inquiries with derision and obfuscation. Hence Shaw's reply to a psychologist who asked what had done the most for him as a writer, “My father's pocketbook.” As literary scholars we have modestly insisted since the beginning of our discipline in the 1880s that our work is valid only if it is restricted to gathering and ordering data, keeping records (for instance, the admirable task, now finally appreciated, of compiling editions and concordances),3 and to saying “Words about Words about Words.”4 This purism has led to exclusion of our inquiries into artistic and literary creativity from the growing body of such research by social scientists. The result has been neglect of the area of our expertise and sensitivity: matters of style and form. I see my work as a part of the recent interdisciplinary endeavor to end the separation of the study of literature from the study of the natural, physical and social sciences5 and to make works concerned with man's emotions and thoughts accessible and useful to the other sciences of man.

For an overall view of a writer's insights into creation, we must turn to his essays on aesthetics, autobiographical fragments, and his stories about artists. In fiction about artists, writers tend to use the hero to portray aspects of their own creative struggle. Each work reveals crucial facts about the writer's own psyche. The assumption underlying my study is that when an author composes a story about another artist, he lays bare the psychological roots of his own creativity and illustrates what makes it flourish and grow. In addition to giving us conscious views about the creative process, these stories reveal aspects of which the writers are unconscious. This supplies us with another dimension of the creative process. Combined with other autobiographical material, these works provide a comprehensive picture of the artist's psyche during the creative process. In studying artist stories and their writers, I found a remarkable consistency between their theory and fiction. I have therefore become convinced that the insight of writers into the wellsprings of literary creation deserves serious psychological as well as literary investigation.

When we study the creative process of a writer and examine how it was acquired and how it operates, we must include consideration of the medium—language, imagery, narrative forms and techniques. In the following analyses we shall therefore investigate the relationship between psychology and style. The in-depth look at a writer's development yields information about origins of stylistic and formal patterns. I believe that close study of the connection between psychology and style can lead to a new understanding of a writer's work, especially as to underlying meaning and form. In turn, this understanding can provide a tool for evaluating literary quality.

When I began, I wanted to include a historical dimension, and therefore I chose stories from different literary movements, from Hoffmann's The Sandman (1816) to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947). I thought this diachronic approach would enable me to observe changes in the way writers viewed the creative process, and possible changes in the process itself. But historical factors proved less important than early environment, family composition, the degree of comfort, encouragement of individual development within, and the pressures on the childhood family. If early learning was so crucial, then there had to be significant differences in the origins of creativity in males and females. When I looked for artist stories by German women writers, I found none until Christa Wolf's A Model Childhood of 1977. Looking at other Western literatures, I found that the genre, a story about a female artist written by a woman, did not exist until the turn of the century, that the earliest and finest examples came from American literature and that differences between men and women (disregarding biology and literary tradition) were indeed greater than those between Hoffmann and Kafka one hundred years later. Since this is so, I assume that the results of my study are not affected by the neat but accidental distribution into male German writers and female American writers. We might say that the creative process is a basic musical theme, on which every artist plays his own variation, its pattern depending on person and background. The woman artist's theme, however, besides being an individual variation, reverses the male artist's theme.

The reader can see from my continuous attraction to these stories and their authors that I experienced a strong countertransference (usually of the positive kind) to them.6 This had the advantage of a strong identification with the protagonists and hence an empathy for their dilemmas. It had the disadvantage of wanting to protect myself against feeling the impact of their failures and therefore being tempted to superimpose explanatory, intellectualized frameworks on the stories for my safety (the usual hazard of the psychological interpreter). It carried with it the danger of identifying all too closely with the protagonists and hence being blind to the complexities of the text and to my own historical and biographical contexts. Interpretation involved constantly keeping a rein on my expectations of the text, checking my perceptions against the author's contexts, questioning myself why I was asking a given question, checking other interpretations, other hermeneutical frameworks and psychological theories to find out what questions I was not and should perhaps be asking, and sensitizing myself, again and again, to minimal clues in the web of the text.

My psychological orientation has undergone considerable modifications during the investigation, modifications which, I recognize in retrospect, reflect some of the important changes in psychoanalytic psychology over the last fifty years. Every author presented a variation on creative difficulties, which was not always accessible to analysis by the same psychological models or theories. For example, the schizophrenia of Büchner's poet could not be understood in terms of Freudian oedipal psychology, which in turn was useful to the study of Hoffmann's artist. The only adequate frameworks for Büchner's work were theories of schizophrenia dealing with double-binding, and communicational and personal failure. Even the oedipal dilemmas of Hoffmann's story, so well discussed by Freud, are greatly modified by pre-oedipal development. Hence I had to include the entire recent study and theory of infantile psychosocial and cognitive development. In addition, I had to look at the post-Freudian authors' areas of agreement and disagreement with Freud in terms of theoretical frameworks differing from the Freudian. British psychoanalysis (Spitz, Anna Freud, Winnicott, Balint—to name a few), the self psychology of Heinz Kohut and the Chicago school, and recent psychiatric, psychological, and psychoanalytic studies on transitional objects and child development provided concepts necessary to study aspects of creativity rooted in earliest mother-child relationships and inaccessible to the oedipal Freudian framework. From early on, I wanted to include women writers, because they contribute to understanding the minimal conditions required for artistic development and how creation can be frustrated. Freudian oedipal theory was of little help here; conceptual frameworks extending to the mother-child symbiosis and the social group were more useful.

Late in my undertaking, I became dissatisfied with reliance on the drive energy model provided by classical Freudian analysis. Surveying my authors, I could see sources of creative energy other than instinct, than libidinal and aggressive psychic energies which were sublimated by creative labor. In many of the stories I analyzed, I found that psychic energy for the creative process came from the social environment. This was energy internalized in the early primary group, restimulated by later encounters and companions. For my authors, creation was social and personal. Thus I found helpful the explanatory frameworks of Kohut, Balint, and Ammon, which locate creative energy in the earliest mother-child relationship and the primary social group.

No single theory accounts for all the facets presented by my authors. Consequently, I took from each theoretical framework what was necessary to understand the creative process as seen by the writer himself. The scholar not acquainted with psychoanalytical inquiry will find that I also examine the creative process and its depiction in works of literature by the traditional methods of literary biography and criticism. The first chapter discussion of the psychological meaning of form and of major psychological and psychoanalytic theories of creativity is intended to acquaint readers with psychological issues and approaches to the study of the creative process so that later discussions may be more readily understood. For the benefit of the reader not readily conversant with the various schools of psychoanalytic theory, a glossary of terms as used in this study is appended.

Through many years of psychological and psychoanalytic inquiry and introspection I have become convinced that psychoanalytical methods and theories have an important place in literary study. I have explored the dynamics of interpersonal relationships portrayed in literature in various psychiatric and academic settings and feel that the interdisciplinary approach is true to the tradition of subjectivity which produced Freud, Jung, and the beginnings of psychoanalysis. And since Freud and early psychoanalysis, as Bruno Bettelheim recently reminded us,7 are very much rooted in the German language and its literature, I considered that I was reclaiming for literary study a heritage which we Germanists had sorely mis-used.

Of course, much in psychoanalysis has changed since Freud's time. As a sub-specialty of psychiatry, it has been enriched during the last fifty years by an enormous mass of clinical data from research by clinics, teaching hospitals, child care institutions, and private facilities. And it has been modified by other theories of human behavior; most significantly, for our purposes, by those of interpersonal dynamics and infant development. From this rich array of data and theories, literary scholars can formulate new questions concerning the writer's problems with his craft, their relationship to his life history (early life history especially) and the psychological function of a writer's creative process in his life. Ignorance of this wealth of theories and supportive data has led even respected monthlies such as The Atlantic or publishing houses like Farrar, Strauss and Giroux to take seriously such confused, ill-informed attacks on psychoanalysis and Freud as Jeffrey Masson's The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.8 Reading these strange accusations and claims, I felt tempted to join with Paul Robinson in bewailing “the dilapidated state into which [Freud's] legacy has fallen,” and blaming it on “the decline of intellectual and literary standards” since Freud's day.9 More convincing motivation for such attacks, and the alacrity with which they are adopted, is what Freud identified as “the narcissistic blow” psychoanalysis continues to deal to man's pride by asserting that man is not master of his own thoughts.10

More serious to psychoanalysis and to all introspective and empathic psychologies are the challenges coming from the growing neurosciences. Freud himself felt that one day many mysteries of mind and soul would be understood as biological processes. Indeed, advances in neurobiology, neurochemistry, neurolinguistics, immunology, systems and living systems theory have generated the popular belief that biochemical solutions to psychological problems are so near that psychological insight and working-through in therapy are fast approaching obsolescence. Such optimism (or pessimism, if one fears abuse of such knowledge) rests on error: great as the advances in the neurosciences have been, they are far from resolving the mysteries of the human mind. Only isolated processes have been made comprehensible (for instance, the workings of a given neurotransmitter, analogous to one brick in a whole building). The vast complexity of many simultaneous, ever-changing brain processes in interactions with the many matter, energy and information processes of the environment are far from being understood. But even if they are comprehended, human understanding of other human beings through introspection and empathy cannot be replaced. It seems more likely that psychoanalysis, “the science of complex mental states, the science of man's experiences,” as Heinz Kohut described it, will pose “the ultimate challenge to scientific thought: to be objective and (in its explanations) phenomenon-distant in the area of the subject, the human soul, the human experience itself.”11

Notes

  1. The genres of the “artist novel” and “artist novella” have found repeated treatment in the various histories of the German novella and the German novel, and it is not my intent to deal with them here. On artist figures as motifs in novel, novella, and drama, cf. the bibliography in Wilpert, Reallexikon der Literatur (Hamburg: Körner, 1959).

  2. Cf. “Arthur Schnitzler's The Last Letter of a Litterateur: The Artist as Destroyer,” American Imago, vol. 34, 3 (1977), 238-276. “Aesthetics, Psychology and Politics in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus,Mosaic, vol. 11, 4 (1978), 1-18. “Grillparzer's The Poor Fiddler: The Power of Denial,” American Imago, vol. 36, 2 (1979), 118-146.

  3. Karl Kroeber, “The Evolution of Literary Study, 1883-1983,” PMLA, 99, 3 (1984), 326-339.

  4. Murray Krieger, “Words about Words about Words: Theory, Criticism, and the Literary Text,” ACADEME, 70, 2 (1984), 17-24.

  5. Charles Altieri in “A Report to the Provinces: Reflections on the Fate of Reading among Behavioral Scientists.” Profession 82: Selected Articles from the Bulletins of the Association of the Departments of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages, 27-31, finds as do I that social and behavioral scientists are beginning to appreciate the humanist's concern for emotion and its study through subjective narrative.

  6. Sebastian and Herma Goeppert in Psychoanalyse interdisziplinär (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1981), give an excellent account of the hermeneutics of literary countertransference.

  7. Cf. Freud and Man's Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).

  8. (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1984); also “Freud and the Seduction Theory: A Challenge to the Foundations of Psychoanalysis,” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1984, 33-53.

  9. Paul Robinson, “Freud's Last Laugh,” The New Republic, March 12, 1984, 29-33.

  10. “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-analysis,” Standard Edition, vol. XVII, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), 141 ff.

  11. “The Psychoanalyst in the Community of Scholars,” in The Search for the Self, II, ed. Paul H. Ornstein (New York: International Universities Press, 1978), 685-724. My italics.

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