Hopkins, Neurosis and Art

‘Madness, frenzy, je ne sais quoi, the sublime, inexplicable, ineffable, unnameable, indefinable, inexpressible, neuter, trace. These are some of the concepts used in Western culture to recognise the obscure movement by means of which literature composes itself into a strangely secret body of language’. ¹

Taking Frias Martins , one must ask the question, is there a necessary connection between literature and neurosis? (I declare a special interest here, as someone who has been writing full-time since 1987.) A necessary connection, that is; not an accidental one.

Art is created by people who have the usual limitations that flesh is heir to. This truism is often overlooked when the link between art and illness comes up for discussion - hence that opening quotation from Martins as a summary of popular misconceptions in this area. Some artists, writers, poets will be unhealthy in one way or another. Illness is part of life. It is an experience which, like any other, will have an influence on the artist.

True - but there is a difference in kind between work undertaken as therapeutic exercise - by patients, say - and that of someone like Frieda Kahlo or Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were sufferers, yes, but being artists they could move beyond individual hurt to some perception of a universal truth.

Hopkins did so in some of his ‘dark sonnets', where the protagonist, driven by anguish, faces the temptation to despair and yet manages to cling onto something,

I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome, devouring eyes my bruised bones?

The lines are worthy of Job, battling to understand the problem of human suffering through his own. Because of an intense reaction to things; because of a capacity to feel, understand and express, the creative person can be especially vulnerable. In some respects, an outsider (as Colin Wilson famously explored) trying to achieve that detachment which is necessary to give shape to an experience. It might be expected that a poet, musician, or creative artist, because of such hyper-involvement might be more open to neurosis and eccentricity than the average, extrovert, person. There is plenty of anecdotal and biographical evidence to support such an assumption - and it is true that many great artists have become insane or had severe mental problems - but when  Holderlin or Nietzsche or Schumann went mad, their great art was behind them. To posit an essential link betweeen creativity and disease is to go too far. To misunderstand the already mysterious processes of any work of art - and this inevitably leads - as much as the theory that everyone is a poet (but not a plumber) - to a vulgarisation of the concept, artist. Is art only born out of neurosis?

Is art only born out of neurosis? Is the poet or painter some kind of weirdo, a little crazy; a neurotic at best? The answer to these questions is No. Crucially, an artist - I say an artist - must be in control of his/her material/ fantasy/ emotion - whereas the neurotic is controlled by it and is not, therefore, its master. This is the core of the matter. Insisting on this, Charles Lamb in 1826 wrote a piece entitled, ‘On the Sanity of True Genius’ in which he refutes the idea that poetry is some kind of insanity. But the true poet dreams, being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it... Where he seems to recede most from humanity, he will be found the truest to it.

Is the Poet an Artist a Weirdo or a Neurotic at Best?

Is the poet or painter some kind of weirdo, a little crazy; a neurotic at best? The answer to these questions is No. Crucially, an artist - I say an artist - must be in control of his/her material/ fantasy/ emotion - whereas the neurotic is controlled by it and is not, therefore, its master. This is the core of the matter. Insisting on this, Charles Lamb in 1826 wrote a piece entitled, ‘On the Sanity of True Genius’ in which he refutes the idea that poetry is some kind of insanity,

But the true poet dreams, being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it... Where he seems to recede most from humanity, he will be found the truest to it. (2)

More recently, Lionel Trilling, in his groundbreaking study, ‘Art and Neurosis’ makes the same point, Of the artist we must say that

Of the artist we must say that whatever elements of neurosis he has in common with his fellow mortals, the one part of him that is healthy, by any conceivable definition of health, is that which gives him the power to conceive, to plan, to work, and to bring his work to a conclusion. (3)

- and, dismissing the idea that the root of artistic power is neurosis, he goes on to make the telling point that, - if we still want to relate the writer’s power to his neurosis - we must be willing to relate all intellectual power to neurosis.⁴ Emphasising the need for control does not mean that we should overlook the fact that the artist may gain some kind of release - as one does from doing anything well. Shakespeare suggests as much, as does his near-contemporary, John Donne quite explicitly, in his poem The Triple Foole,

I could draw my paines
Through Rime’s vexation, I should them allay.
Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce,
For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse

Let us not overlook tha verbs, ‘tames ’and ‘fetters’: Donne is emphasising the crucial need for the poet’s ‘taming’ the feeling rather than of being controlled by it. The distinction between art and therapeusis. This, too, is surely why poetry has something salvific to offer not only to the creator but to a suffering world, a world consumed by false values, a world that has lost its way and its nerve. Such relief, however, as Donne himself makes clear, is incidental to the creation, not descriptive of it. At this stage, may I be allowed to refer to a personal situation. Asked by an Amnesty group to which I then belonged, to write a poem on the theme of Peace, I became convinced that at the heart of the world’s search for peace lies the conflict between what is beautiful, in nature as in people, and the neurosis, the real neurosis, of fear, of pride, and of excess,

PEACE

— by Desmond Egan —

Just to go for a walk out the road
just that under the deep trees
which whisper of peace...

but sweet Christ that
is more than most of mankind can afford
with the globe still plaited in its own
crown of thorns...

too many of us not sure what we want
so that we try to feed a habit for everything
until the ego puppets the militaries
mirror our own warring face
too little peace.

Which leads to the question of the therapeutic use of some artistic disciplines such as painting, writing, sculpture.. as healing exercise. Such writing that is caught up in illness of one kind or another may well be valuable as a kenosis, an emptying or getting rid of some mental or physical ailment - but it cannot of itself offer the energetic shaping of an insight, the plerosis, which true art exemplifies.

The root of all neurosis, Norman Mailer once suggested in an interview, is cowardice, that is, an unwillingness or an inability to face up to reality. Therapeutic work may well be of help in this area but it is quite different from artistic creativity. Art is a confrontation, with no holds barred. Van Gogh may or may not have been schizophrenic - but he was also an artist. The same holds for Strindberg, Goya, Dostoievski, Schumann, Kahlo, Poe, Hopkins and many others who, though variously sharing the problems of the schizophrenic or the like, have also managed to create works that continue to enrich humanity.

The distinction is important if we are not to end up in the kind of confusion which leads to balladeer Bob Dylans’ receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, continuing a trend towards populism, while important literature goes unrecognised. As the editors of The Partisan Review put it,

... in a culture dominated by the media...the result is intellectual chaos - a cacophony of contra dictory opinions spreading all over the political and ideological map... What has been lost, then, is the power to discriminate...It is the less gifted writers and the trendy movements that give the appearance of an unbounded freedom of self-expression - and no common denominator except an enormous capacity for self-indulgence.6The power to discriminate’ - this is the heart of the matter

Any discussion about art and the artist must begin from such discrimination, based on a recognition of the basic gift of an artist: the ability, no matter what his/her personal human problems are, to shape experience. And whether this happens in tranquillity, as Wordsworth suggested, or not, a work of art will always carry its own peculiar tranquillity, that calm implicit in the technical and emotional mastery necessary to objectify some aspect of the mystery of life. We do not deny the carpenter or electrician his craft; we must not deny the artist his/her peculiar gift. Nor the fearlessness, either, involved in its expression. The artist in his creativeness is not afraid. Therapeusis for those who are unwell may be helpful and even necessary but we only create confusion by making false claims for it, confounding its productions with something completely different. Part of the problem in distinguishing the valuable from the superficial in art nowadays lies in just such confusion, giving us journalist-novelists and professor-poets. Galway poet Padraic Fallon, decrying such anti-art, says that we are the worse for it, because,Feeling has been filched from us under false pretences, and a gate closed. ⁷ - false pretences leading, in Milton’s summary in Lycidas, to the tragic situation in which, The hungry sheep look up and are not fed .

The fearlessness of the artist, his/her willingness to pierce through the temporary, the death-bound, so as to arrive at something of permanent truth, is important in confronting the disease of fear. That must be why genuine Art is so therapeutic, and why mankind has always had its art and its artists. Lionel Trilling even affirms that, Poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind.(8 I do not say that art finds its essential definition as a therapy; I do, however, believe that Art may be a kind of medicine, since it and only it can offer the katharsis of pity and terror of which Aristotle speaks in his Poetics ⁹ that peculiar feeling of enlargement as humans which we experience even in viewing a tragic drama; that release which comes from the expression of some emotionally charged insight. And therefore with the control of emotion. Everyone has strong feelings but very few are artists; the newspaper theory that ‘we are all poets’ is a laughable misunderstanding of what is involved. What Aristotle has to say about dramatic tragedy is relevant to all of the arts. Through our vicarious encounter with some profound issue; through the creator’s battle to understand and to express it and, in so doing, to discover something permanent in the face of all that is passing, we can gain a deeper insight into life, a greater compassion, and even, perhaps, a greater strength in facing up to death itself. As John Donne puts it in Death, Be Not Proud /And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.