Raju Chitrakar explores the roots of motivations behind human creativity. For some it's the Oedipus-complex, for him it is nature-complex.
How do human beings create art? What are the motivations? Different scholars have presented different views on the motivating force behind artistic creation. For some of them, it is the Oedipus-complex which prompts one to create art whereas for others it is inferiority or powercomplex. However, in my view, it is nature-complex that prompts one to create art. I will prove my point with reference to the Songs of William Blake.
Until the nineteenth century, literary critics confined themselves more to the role of artistic creation than to its nature. It is Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis, who first talked about the nature of artistic creation. He talked about it in terms of layers of consciousness, what he called id, ego and super-ego. For him Oedipus complex is the guiding force behind human motivation including art. In Introductory Lectures of Psychoanalysis he defines "Oedipus complex" as an expression of the tension between sexual desire toward the parent of the opposite sex and submission to the parents.
In Creative Writing and Day-dreaming he writes: A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.
The artist's earlier experience would be, according to him, his union with his mother.
This is the reason behind the classical Freudian psychoanalysts treating the literary text as analogous to dream and hence searching the neurotic symptoms of the author in it. Marie Bonaparte, a friend and disciple of Freud, for instance, identifies the character of the work of art with the writer of the work. Hence, she takes one of the Edgar Allen Poe's fictional characters killing a black cat and loving a white cat as Poe's loving his mother's breast --the white cat being its symbol. By citing many examples, Gardon Claridge, Ruth Pryor and Gwen Watkins say that most of the writers fall victim of unconscious force. Hence, they link them not only with neurosis but also with psychosis.
Like Freud, archetypal, structural as well as post-structural psychoanalysts agree, one way or other, with unconscious playing, a role in the creation of art. Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of archetypal criticism, rejected Freud's view that a neurotic patient unconsciously makes private symbols of his innate desire. In his view, the patient cannot express the happy feelings of his primordial experience but conceals it from his vision. Vision finds expression in mythological images. What happens in the vision is the collective unconscious. By "collecttive unconscious" he means "a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity." Thus, for him, the collective unconscious is the pure source of art.
Similarly, according to Jacques Lacan, the structural psychoanalyst, unconscious is not only structured like a language, which cannot carry, according to him, full subject or meaning, but it is the very product of language. Julia Kristeva, another structural psychoanalyst, sees the presence of unconscious or what she calls the "semiotic flux" in language that would, according to her, "break down the unity of the transcendental ego."
Like the structural psychoanalysts, the post-structural psychoanalysts believe that language does not carry full meaning or subject. For Jacques Derrida, the proponent of post-structural psychoanalysis, language is already unconscious. The meaning of a word is delayed in the chain of signifiers in search of "transcendental signified": it gives only traces, not full meaning; and hence a text is already deconstructed by its very criteria. Trying to get any meaning from any text is to be muddled in the chain of signifiers.
For the cultural psychoanalysts, however, it is power that makes people move. Michel Foucault, one of the prominent cultural psychoanalysts, writes in A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary that a theory is not recognised in its own period if it does not confer to the powerconsensus of the institutions and official organs of science. It implies that even the artists work for power, by force or will. Like Foucault, Alfred Adler also emphasises strive for superiority complex as the guiding force of human action including artistic creation in the place of "Freud's emphasis on sexuality as the primary force motivating human behaviour."
However, in my view, nature complex is the motivating force behind artistic creation. By 'nature', I mean not only natural phenomenon, but also original human nature. Freudian mother is but one element of nature. When anatural person cannot find nature, he or she is fixated and hence reacts for her fulfillment. If the person is an artist, he or she reacts by means of art. We can take Blake's songs as examples.
William Blake (1757-1827) is the author of several visionary and highlysymbolic works. The Poetical Sketches and The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are anthologies of his songs. In the songs we will see how one feels when one is in nature, and one's reaction when one loses it.
When one is in nature, one feels happy and expresses one's happy feelings one way or other. We can see it in The Songs of Innocence, which shows the happy state of human soul. Most of its characters are children and they are happy. They are happy because they are in contact with nature, and because they are in their natural -- innocent, non differentiating, creative and protected or safe--world. In "Nurse's Song", when the nurse asks the children, who are playing in the green field, to go home as the sun is "gone down", the children, reply, "No, no, let us play, for it is yet day/ And we cannot go to sleep." In "The Lamb", a child compares himself with a lamb and says that both of them are incarnations of God. In "The Little Girl Lost", the seven years old girl, Lyca, is happy even in the company of lions. Blake keeps Lyca safe even in the company of lions to indicate that innocent or natural world is a safer world.
According to Northrop Frye, the world of Songs of Innocence is a heavenly world.
One may argue that natural or innocent state is the state like that of animal, which has no sense of self-development. However, man is different from animal because he has imaginative capacity. According to Fyre, for Blake, "The primeval state of man was Wisdom, Art and Science." Blake rejected the eighteenth century age of reason and the cult of Voltaire and Rousseau because they did not give any place to imagination. He did not agree even with William Wordsworth because, according to Fyre, Wordsworth "proposed to treat the relation of man and nature as one of correspondence, each being 'exquisitely fitted' to the other."
Contrary to The Songs of Innocence, in The Songs of Experience, we see how one feels when one is away from nature or natural state. The songs represent the frustrated state of human soul. All of its characters are experienced and sad. In "London", the speaker finds everyone in the state of frustration. He says,
In every cry of every Man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forg'd manacles I hear.
There are various causes behind their sadness. The main cause is that they are away from their natural state as they are in the oppressive world of experience. In "Earth's Answer", the earth is personified as a woman. She knows very well that she is imprisoned by "selfish father of man." "Selfish father", according to J.R. Watson, is a "representative father --God figure." The Earth knows that one cannot be happy in such an oppressive condition. She asks, "Does the sower/ Sow by night?" Similarly, in "Gwin, King of Norway", a narrative song from The Poetical Sketches, the king, Gwin, rules tyrannically over the nations of the North: "They tear the poor man's lambs and drive/The needs from their door!" The oppressed people fight against the tyranny. The consequence of the war is destruction of the people and defeat of the tyrant: " The stench of blood makes sick the heavens;/ Gwin fell, the songs of Norway fled" The king is defeated because he leaves the natural path and becomes cruel, which is unnatural.
By making the king defeat, Blake's purpose is not to create any sort of hierarchical society but a natural or heavenly one in which there will be peace, love, pity, mercy, art, science and wisdom, and where no one will think oneself superior or inferior to others. In "A War Song to Englishmen", the speaker asks the soldiers to prepare holy war:
Soldier, prepare our cause in heaven's cause;
Soldiers, prepare! Be worthy of our cause:
Prepare to meet our fathers in the sky:
For Blake, earth itself is heaven and one becomes able to live in the heavenly world and be happy when one follows truth, virtue and innocence. In the "Song by an Old Shepherd", the Old Shepherd says the same:
Whilst virtue is our walking,
staff And truth a lantern to our path,
We can abide life 's pelting storm
That makes our limbs quake, if our hearts be worm.
Since the shepherd is old, he knows it from his experience.
Blake accepts the state of experience, not as a truth but as a means to attain the natural state of man: wisdom, art and science. Blake elsewhere writes,"To be an error, to be cast out is a part of God's design/ No man cam embrace truth till he has explored and cast out." Describing illustration xxi of Blake's Book of Job, Joseph H. Wicksteed writes that experience is not experience till it has been actually endured and embodied in the flesh. For Blake, as he writes in "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", truth can never be told as to be understood and not to be believed. The person who reattains his or her natural state will be innocent, not clever. The difference between a natural person and a person who reattains his of her natural state after the experienced state is that the former is innocent naturally and the latter becomes innocent consciously. For Blake, the state of innocence is not the state of ignorance but of wisdom. In "Vala or The Four Zoas" he writes, "Innocence dwells with wisdom but never with ignorance." Frye calls the innocence acquired after experience a "conscious innocence". Harold Bloom calls it "organized innocence.". For Blake, unorganised innocence is impossible. At the end of "Vala or The Four Zoas" he writes, "Unorganised innocence: An impossibility."
For the reattained natural state, Blake calls the state of "Poetic Genius" or God. By "Poetic Genius" he means not the negation of passion, but illumination of understanding or intellect. For Blake, as quoted by Wicksteed, "The Poetic Genius is the true Man ….The Body or Outward Form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius", and "as all man are alike in Outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius." Hence, he takes art as religion. For Blake, in the state of heaven or "Poetic Genius", God and man are no longer different but one. Therefore, Blake assign shimself to open the visionary or immortal eyes of people. He writes:
I rest not from my great task
To open the eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal eyes Of man inwards;
into the worlds of Thought into Eternity Ever expanding in the bosom of God,
the Heaven Imagination.
For Blake, one can open one's immortal eye through imagination. Hence, he takes imagination as God, argues Frye.
Blake produced his art presenting such a genius concept because there emerged a nature complex in him. Nature complex emerged in him because he loved nature, which includes creatve or imaginative force in man, but he found the world oppressive or unnatural. This nature complex stimulated him to produce his great works to reacquire nature.Elizabeth Wright writes in Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice, Blake would be a natural person for
Gills Deleuze, a philsopher, and Felix Guttari, a radical, as they take an artist not as the "schizo" but as a "representative of a potential desirable and natural human condition"
Therefore it can rightly be said that nature-complex is the motivating force behind artistic creation. Love, pity, peace, mercy, art, wisdom, science, innocence or understanding are the natural attributes of man. In the absence of these, nature-complex is emerged in a natural man and he or she is naturally prompted to react for the fulfilment of nature. If the person is an artist, he or she naturally reacts by means of art.
Write us your opinion about this essay at feedback@newslookmag.com
Chitrakar, a Newslook contributing writer, is a devotee of literature.
How do human beings create art? What are the motivations? Different scholars have presented different views on the motivating force behind artistic creation. For some of them, it is the Oedipus-complex which prompts one to create art whereas for others it is inferiority or powercomplex. However, in my view, it is nature-complex that prompts one to create art. I will prove my point with reference to the Songs of William Blake.
Until the nineteenth century, literary critics confined themselves more to the role of artistic creation than to its nature. It is Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychoanalysis, who first talked about the nature of artistic creation. He talked about it in terms of layers of consciousness, what he called id, ego and super-ego. For him Oedipus complex is the guiding force behind human motivation including art. In Introductory Lectures of Psychoanalysis he defines "Oedipus complex" as an expression of the tension between sexual desire toward the parent of the opposite sex and submission to the parents.
In Creative Writing and Day-dreaming he writes: A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfilment in the creative work.
The artist's earlier experience would be, according to him, his union with his mother.
This is the reason behind the classical Freudian psychoanalysts treating the literary text as analogous to dream and hence searching the neurotic symptoms of the author in it. Marie Bonaparte, a friend and disciple of Freud, for instance, identifies the character of the work of art with the writer of the work. Hence, she takes one of the Edgar Allen Poe's fictional characters killing a black cat and loving a white cat as Poe's loving his mother's breast --the white cat being its symbol. By citing many examples, Gardon Claridge, Ruth Pryor and Gwen Watkins say that most of the writers fall victim of unconscious force. Hence, they link them not only with neurosis but also with psychosis.
Like Freud, archetypal, structural as well as post-structural psychoanalysts agree, one way or other, with unconscious playing, a role in the creation of art. Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of archetypal criticism, rejected Freud's view that a neurotic patient unconsciously makes private symbols of his innate desire. In his view, the patient cannot express the happy feelings of his primordial experience but conceals it from his vision. Vision finds expression in mythological images. What happens in the vision is the collective unconscious. By "collecttive unconscious" he means "a certain psychic disposition shaped by the forces of heredity." Thus, for him, the collective unconscious is the pure source of art.
Similarly, according to Jacques Lacan, the structural psychoanalyst, unconscious is not only structured like a language, which cannot carry, according to him, full subject or meaning, but it is the very product of language. Julia Kristeva, another structural psychoanalyst, sees the presence of unconscious or what she calls the "semiotic flux" in language that would, according to her, "break down the unity of the transcendental ego."
Like the structural psychoanalysts, the post-structural psychoanalysts believe that language does not carry full meaning or subject. For Jacques Derrida, the proponent of post-structural psychoanalysis, language is already unconscious. The meaning of a word is delayed in the chain of signifiers in search of "transcendental signified": it gives only traces, not full meaning; and hence a text is already deconstructed by its very criteria. Trying to get any meaning from any text is to be muddled in the chain of signifiers.
For the cultural psychoanalysts, however, it is power that makes people move. Michel Foucault, one of the prominent cultural psychoanalysts, writes in A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary that a theory is not recognised in its own period if it does not confer to the powerconsensus of the institutions and official organs of science. It implies that even the artists work for power, by force or will. Like Foucault, Alfred Adler also emphasises strive for superiority complex as the guiding force of human action including artistic creation in the place of "Freud's emphasis on sexuality as the primary force motivating human behaviour."
However, in my view, nature complex is the motivating force behind artistic creation. By 'nature', I mean not only natural phenomenon, but also original human nature. Freudian mother is but one element of nature. When anatural person cannot find nature, he or she is fixated and hence reacts for her fulfillment. If the person is an artist, he or she reacts by means of art. We can take Blake's songs as examples.
William Blake (1757-1827) is the author of several visionary and highlysymbolic works. The Poetical Sketches and The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are anthologies of his songs. In the songs we will see how one feels when one is in nature, and one's reaction when one loses it.
When one is in nature, one feels happy and expresses one's happy feelings one way or other. We can see it in The Songs of Innocence, which shows the happy state of human soul. Most of its characters are children and they are happy. They are happy because they are in contact with nature, and because they are in their natural -- innocent, non differentiating, creative and protected or safe--world. In "Nurse's Song", when the nurse asks the children, who are playing in the green field, to go home as the sun is "gone down", the children, reply, "No, no, let us play, for it is yet day/ And we cannot go to sleep." In "The Lamb", a child compares himself with a lamb and says that both of them are incarnations of God. In "The Little Girl Lost", the seven years old girl, Lyca, is happy even in the company of lions. Blake keeps Lyca safe even in the company of lions to indicate that innocent or natural world is a safer world.
According to Northrop Frye, the world of Songs of Innocence is a heavenly world.
One may argue that natural or innocent state is the state like that of animal, which has no sense of self-development. However, man is different from animal because he has imaginative capacity. According to Fyre, for Blake, "The primeval state of man was Wisdom, Art and Science." Blake rejected the eighteenth century age of reason and the cult of Voltaire and Rousseau because they did not give any place to imagination. He did not agree even with William Wordsworth because, according to Fyre, Wordsworth "proposed to treat the relation of man and nature as one of correspondence, each being 'exquisitely fitted' to the other."
Contrary to The Songs of Innocence, in The Songs of Experience, we see how one feels when one is away from nature or natural state. The songs represent the frustrated state of human soul. All of its characters are experienced and sad. In "London", the speaker finds everyone in the state of frustration. He says,
In every cry of every Man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind forg'd manacles I hear.
There are various causes behind their sadness. The main cause is that they are away from their natural state as they are in the oppressive world of experience. In "Earth's Answer", the earth is personified as a woman. She knows very well that she is imprisoned by "selfish father of man." "Selfish father", according to J.R. Watson, is a "representative father --God figure." The Earth knows that one cannot be happy in such an oppressive condition. She asks, "Does the sower/ Sow by night?" Similarly, in "Gwin, King of Norway", a narrative song from The Poetical Sketches, the king, Gwin, rules tyrannically over the nations of the North: "They tear the poor man's lambs and drive/The needs from their door!" The oppressed people fight against the tyranny. The consequence of the war is destruction of the people and defeat of the tyrant: " The stench of blood makes sick the heavens;/ Gwin fell, the songs of Norway fled" The king is defeated because he leaves the natural path and becomes cruel, which is unnatural.
By making the king defeat, Blake's purpose is not to create any sort of hierarchical society but a natural or heavenly one in which there will be peace, love, pity, mercy, art, science and wisdom, and where no one will think oneself superior or inferior to others. In "A War Song to Englishmen", the speaker asks the soldiers to prepare holy war:
Soldier, prepare our cause in heaven's cause;
Soldiers, prepare! Be worthy of our cause:
Prepare to meet our fathers in the sky:
For Blake, earth itself is heaven and one becomes able to live in the heavenly world and be happy when one follows truth, virtue and innocence. In the "Song by an Old Shepherd", the Old Shepherd says the same:
Whilst virtue is our walking,
staff And truth a lantern to our path,
We can abide life 's pelting storm
That makes our limbs quake, if our hearts be worm.
Since the shepherd is old, he knows it from his experience.
Blake accepts the state of experience, not as a truth but as a means to attain the natural state of man: wisdom, art and science. Blake elsewhere writes,"To be an error, to be cast out is a part of God's design/ No man cam embrace truth till he has explored and cast out." Describing illustration xxi of Blake's Book of Job, Joseph H. Wicksteed writes that experience is not experience till it has been actually endured and embodied in the flesh. For Blake, as he writes in "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", truth can never be told as to be understood and not to be believed. The person who reattains his or her natural state will be innocent, not clever. The difference between a natural person and a person who reattains his of her natural state after the experienced state is that the former is innocent naturally and the latter becomes innocent consciously. For Blake, the state of innocence is not the state of ignorance but of wisdom. In "Vala or The Four Zoas" he writes, "Innocence dwells with wisdom but never with ignorance." Frye calls the innocence acquired after experience a "conscious innocence". Harold Bloom calls it "organized innocence.". For Blake, unorganised innocence is impossible. At the end of "Vala or The Four Zoas" he writes, "Unorganised innocence: An impossibility."
For the reattained natural state, Blake calls the state of "Poetic Genius" or God. By "Poetic Genius" he means not the negation of passion, but illumination of understanding or intellect. For Blake, as quoted by Wicksteed, "The Poetic Genius is the true Man ….The Body or Outward Form of Man is derived from the Poetic Genius", and "as all man are alike in Outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the Poetic Genius." Hence, he takes art as religion. For Blake, in the state of heaven or "Poetic Genius", God and man are no longer different but one. Therefore, Blake assign shimself to open the visionary or immortal eyes of people. He writes:
I rest not from my great task
To open the eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal eyes Of man inwards;
into the worlds of Thought into Eternity Ever expanding in the bosom of God,
the Heaven Imagination.
For Blake, one can open one's immortal eye through imagination. Hence, he takes imagination as God, argues Frye.
Blake produced his art presenting such a genius concept because there emerged a nature complex in him. Nature complex emerged in him because he loved nature, which includes creatve or imaginative force in man, but he found the world oppressive or unnatural. This nature complex stimulated him to produce his great works to reacquire nature.Elizabeth Wright writes in Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice, Blake would be a natural person for
Gills Deleuze, a philsopher, and Felix Guttari, a radical, as they take an artist not as the "schizo" but as a "representative of a potential desirable and natural human condition"
Therefore it can rightly be said that nature-complex is the motivating force behind artistic creation. Love, pity, peace, mercy, art, wisdom, science, innocence or understanding are the natural attributes of man. In the absence of these, nature-complex is emerged in a natural man and he or she is naturally prompted to react for the fulfilment of nature. If the person is an artist, he or she naturally reacts by means of art.
Write us your opinion about this essay at feedback@newslookmag.com
Chitrakar, a Newslook contributing writer, is a devotee of literature.
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