Form and Malignant Form The Metaphorically Correct Artist - Narcissism and Romanticist Mutations

Written by Sam Vaknin

The romanticist view of the artist painted him into a corner. His life and art became inextricable. Artists were expected to transmute and transubstantiate their lives as well as the physical materials that they dealt with. Living (the kind of life, which is the subject of legends or fables) became an art form, at times predominantly so.

It is interesting to note the prevalence of romanticist ideas in this context: Weltschmerz, passion, self destruction were considered fit for the artist. A "boring" artist would never sell as much as a "romantically-correct" one. Van Gogh, Kafka and James Dean epitomize this trend: they all died young, lived in misery, endured self-inflicted pains, and ultimate destruction or annihilation. To paraphrase Sontag, their lives became metaphors and they all contracted the metaphorically correct physical and mental illnesses of their day and age: Kafka developed tuberculosis, Van Gogh was mentally ill, James Dean died appropriately in an accident. In an age of social anomies, we tend to appreciate and rate highly the anomalous. Munch and Nietzsche will always be preferable to more ordinary (but perhaps equally creative) people.

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Today there is an anti-romantic backlash (divorce, the disintegration of the romantic nation-state, the death of ideologies, the commercialization and popularization of art). But this counter-revolution tackles the external, less substantial facets of Romanticism. Romanticism continues to thrive in the flourishing of mysticism, of ethnic lore, and of celebrity worship. It seems that Romanticism has changed vessels but not its cargo.

We are afraid to face the fact that life is meaningless unless WE observe it, unless WE put it in context, unless WE interpret it. WE feel burdened by this realization, terrified of making the wrong moves, of using the wrong contexts, of making the wrong interpretations.

We understand that there is no constant, unchanged, everlasting meaning to life, and that it all really depends on us. We denigrate this kind of meaning. A meaning that is derived by people from human contexts and experiences is bound to be a very poor approximation to the ONE, TRUE meaning. It is bound to be asymptotic to the Grand Design. It might well be - but this is all we have got and without it our lives will indeed prove meaningless.

next: The Manifold of Sense