Rank—Art and Artist (vi)—Life and Creation

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

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Chapter Two
LIFE AND CREATION

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...the fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist,...the reciprocal influence of these two spheres.
...creativity lies equally at the root of artistic production and of life experience. ...lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse, and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap. Then, too, the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality, which, being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way. ...

[39] In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it. ...

...besides the original biological duality of impulse and inhibition in man;...[there is also to be reckoned with] the psychological factor par excellence, the individual will, which manifests itself both negatively as a controlling element, and positively as the urge to create. This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the antisexual tendency in human beings, which we may describe as the deliberate control of the impulsive life. ...

[40] If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through
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will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsion-neurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms impulse instead of controlling it. In this type...we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people...; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively...

And here we reach the essential point of difference between the productive type who creates and the thrwarted neurotic... Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. ...

...

[43] it does not take long to perceive that experience is the expression of the impulse-ego, production of the will-ego . The external difficulties in an artist's experience appear, in this sense, but as manifestations of this internal dualism of impulse and will...
Instinct presses in the direction of experience and, in the limit, to consequent exhaustion—in fact,
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death —while will drives to creation and thus to immortalization . On the other hand, the productive type also pays toll to life by his work and to death by bodily and spiritual sufferings of a "neurotic" order; and conversely in many cases the product of a type that is at bottom neurotic may be his sole propitiary offering to Life. It is with reason, therefore, that from the beginning two basic types of artist have been distinguished; these have been called at one time Dionysian and Apollonian, and at another Classical and Romantic. ... The one creates more from fullness of powers and sublimation , the other more from exhaustion and compensation . The work of the one is entire in every single expression , that of the other is partial even in its totality , for the one lives itself out, positively, in the work , while the other pays with the work —pays, not only to society (for both do that), but to life itself, from which the one strives to win freedom by self-willed creation whereas for the other the thing created is the expression of life itself. ...

[45] primitive art, the expression of a collective ideology, perpetuated by abstraction which has found its religious expression in the idea of the soul; Classical art, based on a social art-concept, perpetuated by idealization, which has found its purest expression in the conception of beauty; and, lastly, modern art, based on the concept of the individual genius and perpetuated by concretization, which has found its clearest expression in the personality-cult of the artistic individuality itself.

Sure. But if personality-cult s are the clearest expression of the concept of the individual genius , this suggests the reappearance of social (maybe even collective ?) elements in contemporary art-ideology rather than their outright supersession.

One reason is that the ideology of individual genius has not yet (still!) become an ideology of rugged individualism. The exceptions I was taught about in music school, not in these terms and ever so briefly, were Schoenberg and Babbitt; as far as I can tell they remain exceptions, and if you want to argue that their respective withdrawals from social life were just cheap talk, you'd probably win the argument. The individual cut loose from rootedness in a small community and thrust into the endless horizons and "impersonal public order" of the industrialized world is not, for all that, mechanistically destined to become a lone wolf. As the metaphor itself indicates (along with much of what Rank has said so far), the lone wolf is a psychological type, not a social type. So, Schoenberg ended up at UCLA, Babbitt at Princeton. That is not quite a withdrawal! The "market" is not the "audience!" Rank explains precisely why! Really this "withdrawal" is just an alternative solution on the same "social" or "secular" level of power (Becker, Birth), perhaps truly "elitist" this time, but in any case not a "lone" anything.

Rank shows precisely why the so-called individual genius artist needs the public even more desperately than did prior archetypes. Here is yet one more suggestion that in art, "individualism" does not lead ineluctibly toward total dissipation of social ties and communal accountability; perhaps paradoxically, it does not lead to a war of all-against-all but rather to something less threatening (and far less exciting), a pluralism of interest groups among which the warring is sporadic, cyclical, and usually far too absurd to pose a much of a real threat to broader social stability. (Dr. Grayson's wonderful (if apocryphal) example: Schoenberg and Stravinsky dodging each other in the aisles of West LA grocery stores.) The paradox, namely, is that in reaching for a radical subjectivity, the genius must eventually go public; and in going public they objectify themselves and are objectified (equally radically if not more so, as is commonplace nowadays) by the(ir) public. The "fundamental duality" of individual and collective holds, even here-and-now.

In Becker's post-Rankian parlance, attachment to a genius artist is among the more fertile causa-sui projects most ordinary people nowadays are presented with. (If "ordinary people" is good enough terminology for Christopher Lasch, then it's good enough for me.) Observations such as this habitually call to mind the undifferentiated "philistine" classes as Becker presents Kierkegaard's formulation of them, more or less desperate for self-causes depending on their overall psychic constitution but always lacking for precisely this validation in the "ordinary" course of their lives. I for one have found there to be no shortage of doctors and lawyers veritably larping-out their various midlife crises as audience members at subcultural arts events. This is a symbiosis certainly, but it is not a eubiosis. And politically also, there is some roootedness here but no mutuality; some "choice" but no "freedom." It is one solution to life's riddle, but I can't shake the gut feeling that it's not the best solution or even, for many of these well-to-do people, a good one. (Yup, I was already convinced of this and Rank/Becker merely provide the rationalizations. But what rationalizations they provide . . . )

Proper populism dictates a concern for these upper middle masses, too, "philistine" and "elitist" though they themselves may often be; such concern takes priority over haute-elitist concern for art's place in society, and over those tiresome parables of the misunderstood genius and the starving artist. Bourgeois quietism is stifling. It does not discriminate between the impulse-ego and the will-ego . It can stifle anyone. The artist, too, does not actually find much hard or soft currency forthcoming even from a large public of stifled bourgeois, who in their compromised position cannot really reciprocate what is being presented to them. Granted this factor is contingent rather than irremediable, it nonetheless suggests as strongly as any more exalted formulation of Rank or Becker that the social route is a bandaid solution which, whether or not in the last analysis it can be superseded, certainly deserves to be superseded given what we have been able to observe about it by way of such contingencies as have yet manifested.

In Becker's terms, once again, the "web of fictions" within which bourgeois quietism is "suspended" cannot well withstand even the meager "reality" which can be perceived from within its grasp. The "sacred" devotion of an audience is the only true reciprocation that a devout artist can receive. We must find that our quality of belief onstage is being matched out in the seats. Even if aesthetics are no obstacle, this kind of audience is very hard to find, and of course, as no "social" creatures fail to point out, it is very small indeed. But it is hard to shake the impression that this devoutness of engagement as audiences is precisely what many people are desperately searching for but cannot allow themselves, in their midlife bourgeois quietist connundrum, to break out into, since it would not be tolerated (to put it mildly) by their immediate "social" circle. (We are seeing more of this, of course, but exclusively through "mass" phenomena which thereby can be brought under the quietist big-tent. Hence Star Wars-themed attire or conflicting sports allegiances probably won't break up a family gathering, but playing Milton Babbitt from the boombox probably will, still.)

Here, then, in contrast to the primitive stage, it is the artist and not art that
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matters, and naturally therefore the experience of the individual takes on the significance characteristic of the romantic artist-type. Here, obviously, not only do we see the tendency—in our view the basic tendency—of the artist-type to put oneself and one's life into one's creative work;

Is this really what the remarks made so far about romanticism point to?

but we see also how, in the eyes of this type, the problem of the relation between experience and creation has become an artistic (æsthetic) one; whereas it is really only a psychological one,

In other words, æsthetic, by its nature, can only deal with the effect of a work of art . Putting oneself and one's life into one's creative work is easy; for the audience to fish you back out, unharmed, and to stand you back on your feet, this is much more difficult.

which discloses, indeed, important points of contact with art (considered as an ideological conception), but differs from it in its essence.

For the romantic dualism of life and production, which manifests itself as a mixture of both spheres, has, as a typical conflict within the modern individual, nothing to do with art, although obliged like art to express itself creatively. This romantic dualism of life and creation , which corresponds to our psychological dualism of impulse and will , is, in the last resort, the conflict between collective and individual mortality , in which we have all suffered so acutely since the decay of religion and the decline of art.

This would seem to make the anti-modern slant explicit, unless decline is standing for an esoteric or untranslatable meaning.

Modernism cannot be denied its collective bonafides sheerly on the basis of aesthetic intransigence. What else but this has Rank shown, even in his chilliness toward his own times? Once one subscribes to the Rankian view of things, one may not apply these insights only selectively. Modernists too fall all along these various Rankian continua. No one needs to "like" any particular artifact of modernism, but it is quite the tightrope act to render modernism statically and the rest of art history dynamically. That is all, for now.

The romantic type, flung hither and thither between the urge to perpetuate his own life by creating and the compulsion to turn himself and life into a work of art,

N.B., the Wilde prescription with which Lasch took such issue is here rendered as (merely!) one side of the Romantic's inner conflict.

thus appears as the last representative of an art-ideology which, like the religious collective-ideology, is in the process of dying out. This does not prevent this final attempt to rescue the semi-collective "religion of genius" by taking it into modern individualism from bringing forth outstanding and permanently valuable works of art; perhaps, indeed (as Nietzsche himself, the ultra-Romantic, recognized), it requires that it should .

Yay!

On the other hand, it is just the appearance of this decadent type of artist which marks the beginning of a new development of personality, since the tendency to self-
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perpetuation is in the end transferred to the ego from which it originally sprang.

This becomes the topic of importance towards the end of the book.

For now . . .

Again, I wonder if Rank underestimates the degree to which contemporary personality-cults may be (or become) collective . By the latter term he seems to mean something more like "universal within a homogenous culture," whereas what might in the USA be called "mass" culture was, even/especially in McLuhan's specialized usage, to say nothing of the colloquial sense, never even close to "universal" even at its apex; and yet it strains credulity to say that mid-twentieth century "mass" culture was not "collective."

The hang up? Hate to say it, but mere awareness of "the other" seems to be sufficient in itself to shatter the "collective" into 8 billion pieces. From present circumstances it is much harder to chart a course towards anything "collective" in Rank's sense than it is to know precisely how to take a giant shit on the organic/naive beginnings of subcultural, proto-collective behavior. No wonder, then, that we get only the latter and none of the former. Enjoy your movie.

On this issue the romantic becomes identical, as a psychological type, with the neurotic—this is not a valuation, but merely a statement of fact—... We can thus understand the experience-problem of the individualist type of artist also only by studying the nature of neurosis , just as the therapy of the neurotic requires an understanding of the creative type. Now, the neurotic represents the individual who aims at self-preservation by restricting his experience , thus showing his adherence to the naïve faith in immortality of the primitive, though without the collective soul-ideology which supports that faith. The productivity of the individual, or of the thing created, replaces—for the artist as for the community—the originally religious ideology by a social value ; that is, the work of art not only immortalizes the artist ideologically instead of personally , but also secures to the community a future life in the collective elements of the work . Even at this last stage of individual art-creativity there function ideologies (whether given or chosen) of an æsthetic, a social, or a psychological nature as collective justifications of the artist's art, in which the personal factor makes itself more and more felt and appreciated.

So, once again, the picture is more varied than mere "decadence!"

If the impulse to create productively is explicable only by the conception of immortality, the question of the experience problem of the neurotic has its source in failure of the impulse to perpetuate , which results in fear, but is also probably conditioned by it. There is (as I have shown) a double sort of fear : on the one hand the fear of life which aims at avoidance or postponement of death, and on the other the fear of death which underlies the desire for immortality. According to the
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compromise which men make between these two poles of fear, and the predominance of one or the other form, there will be various dynamic solutions of this conflict, which hardly permit of description by type-labelling. For, in practice, both in the neurotic and in the productive type...all the forces are brought into play, though with varying accentuation and periodical balancing of values. In general, a strong preponderance of the fear of life will lead rather to neurotic , and the fear of death to production —that is, perpetuation in the work produced. But the fear of life, from which we all suffer, conditions the problem of experience in the productive type as in other people, just as the fear of death whips up the neurotic's constructive powers. The individual whose life is braked is led thereby to flee from experience, because he fears that he will become completely absorbed in it—which would mean death—and so is bound up with fear. Unlike the productive type, who strives to be deathless through his work, the neurotic does not seek immortality in any clearly defined sense, but in primitive fashion as a naïve saving or accumulation of actual life. But even the individualist artist-type must sacrifice both life and experience to make art out of them. Thus we see that what the artist needs for true creative art in addition to his technique and a definite ideology is life in one form or another; and the two artist-types differ essentially in the source from which they take this life that is so essential to production. The Classical type, who is possibly poorer within, but nearer to life, and himself more vital, takes it from without : that is, he creates immortal work from mortal life without necessarily having first transformed it into personal experience as is the case with the Romantic. For, to the Romantic , experience of his own appears to be an essential preliminary to productivity, although he does not use this experience for the enrichment of his own personality, but to economize the personal experiences, the burden of which he would fain escape. Thus the one artist-type constantly makes use of other life than his own—in fact,
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nature—for the purpose of creating, while the other can create only by perpetually sacrificing his own life. This essential difference of attitude to the fundamental problem of life throws a psychological light on the contrast in styles of various periods in art. Whatever æsthetic designation may be applied to this contrast, from the spiritual point of view the work of the Classicist , more or less naturalistic, artist is essentially partial , and the work of the Romantic , produced from within, total . This totality-type spends itself perpetually in creative work without absorbing very much of life, while the partial type has continually to absorb life so that now he may throw it off again in his work. ... He needs, as it were, for each work that he builds, a sacrifice which is buried alive to ensure a permanent existence to the structure, but also to save the artist from having to give himself. The frequent occasions when a great work of art has been created in the reaction following upon the death of a close relation seem to me to realize those favourable cases for this type of artist in which he can dispense with the killing of the building's victim because that victim has died a natural death and has subsequently, to all appearances, had a monument piously erected to him.

The mistake in all modern psychological biography lies in its attempt to "explain" the artist's work by his experience, whereas creation can only be made understandable through the inner dynamism and its central problems .

At the risk of belaboring the point: why the desperate need to explain ?

The inevitable differences in inner dynamism between types of artists, and between artists and non-artists, these differences can be most but not all of the answer when explanation is asked to explain itself. Do a quick brainstorm of other areas of contemporary society where such explanation is so routinely called for, and where it is offered up even if it has not been called for, at least not by the principal(s), but perhaps from outsiders working (necessarily) with incomplete information. There won't be many "recreational" or "contemplative" activities! It's life and death here too!

Then, too, the
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real artist regards his work as more important than the whole of life and experience, which are but a means to production—almost, indeed, a by-product of it. This refers, however, to the Classical type only, for to the Romantic type his personal ego and his experience are more important than, or as important as, his work; sometimes, indeed, production may be simply a means to life , just as to the other type experience is but a means to production . This is why Romantic art is far more subjective, far more closely bound up with experience, than Classical, which is more objective and linked to life. In no case, however, will the individual become an artist through any one experience, least of all through the experiences of childhood... The becoming of the artist has a particular genesis, one of the manifestations of which may be some special experience. For the artistic impulse to create is a dynamic factor apart from the content of experience , a will-problem which the artist solves in a particular way . That is, he is capable of forming the given art-ideology —whether of the collective kind (style) or the personal (genius-idea)— into the substance of his creative will . He employs, so to say, personal will-power to give form or life to an ideology, which must have not only social qualities like other ideologies, but purely artistic ones, which will be more closely specific from the point of view of æsthetics.

The subjective character of modern art, which is based on the ideology of a personal type of artist, imposes also a special outlook in the artist towards his own creative power and his work. The more production is an essential means to life (and not just a particular ideological expression of it) , the more will the work itself be required to justify the personality—instead of expressing it—and the more will this subjective artist-type need individuals to justify his production . From this point of view as well as others it is easy to see that experience, in its particular form of love-experience, takes on a peculiar significance for the Romantic artist, whose art is based on the personality-cult of the genius-concept. The primi-
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tive artist-type finds his justification in the work itself; the Classical justifies the work by his life, but the Romantic must justify both life and experience by his work and, further, must have a witness of his life to justify his production. The fundamental problem of the Romantic artist is thus the self-justification of the individual raised above the crowd, while the Classical artist-type expresses himself in his work—which receives a social justification by way of general recognition. But the Romantic needs, further, whether as contrast or as supplement to this social approval, a personal approbation of his own, because his feeling of the guilt of creation can no longer be allayed by a collective ideology any more than he can work effectively in the service of such an ideology. In this sense his artistic work is rather a forcible liberation from inward pressure than the voluntary expression of a fundamentally strong personality that is capable of paralysing the subjective element to a great extent by making collective symbolism his own. The artist who approximates more nearly to the Classical type excels less, therefore, in the creating of new forms than in perfecting them. Further, he will make much more frequent use of old traditional material, full of a powerful collective resonance, as the content of his work, while the Romantic seeks new forms and contents in order to be able to express his personal self more completely.

Thus, as the artist-type becomes more and more individualized, he appears on the one hand to need a more individual ideology...for his art, while on the other his work is more subjective and more personal, until finally he requires for the justification of his production and individual "public" also: a single person for whom ostensibly he creates.

Interesting to consider in this connection Supek's "ontlogical nominalism" vs. "ontological realism." That "realism" per which "society...is some sort of higher, organic, and closed entity" is indispensible to the collapsing of diverse individual behaviors into "the audience" or "my public," who can nowadays equally well serve as an individual "public" as a collective one. This certainly permits of a taxonomy of artists along Rankian lines, but now taking better account of the commercial imperative, which is itself also highly dependent on this peculiar "realism."

Rank notes that the Muse is "in practice, usually a real woman." (52) He elaborates quite a bit. I am content to leave all of that alone.

Then comes the stuff about boy-love in Greece . . .