We often wonder where the poet gets his materials, and how he touches us so deeply. If we’d ask him, he could hardly give us an answer that would satisfy us more than when we would ask a dog how to bark. Even if the poet knew, and if he’d be willing to tell us, this knowledge wouldn’t make us a (better) poet. Now, when I talk about poets I talk not only about writers of poetry but also novels, plays, film scripts or even song lyrics.
One could argue that there is a poet in all of us. Mostly he is sleeping under a blanket of inhibition, shyness, convention, and the trials and tribulations of everyday life. We can see this poet in action when we look at a child that plays: he creates his own world by combining his ideas and thoughts with whatever he finds useful in the real world and rearranging it to his needs and his pleasure. Just like a poet does. And just like the poet, the child takes his play very seriously. Think about it: the opposite of play is not seriousness, it’s reality. Playfulness and seriousness go hand in hand. Even Nietzsche said: the maturity of man: that means to rediscover the seriousness he had as a child, when playing.
Die Reife des Mannes: das heißt den Ernst wiedergefunden zu haben den man als Kind hatte, beim Spiel
Friedrich Nietzsche
As adults we are expected to live in the “real world”. As we grow up we cease to play, at least on the surface. But we can’t do without the advantages of play, without the joy of it. We are not just homo sapiens, we are also homo ludens: the playing man. Instead of playing, of acting out our phantasies and ideas, we adults keep our phantasies to ourselves. We daydream. These daydreams and phantasies, unlike children’s play, cannot be observed, and so we are inclined to think that we are the only ones who have these particular daydreams and phantasies. And because we think we are the only ones, we are often shy and ashamed of them. Most people would rather admit to some vice they didn’t even do, than to reveal their deepest phantasies, especially when they are about sex or violence or something else that’s taboo in our society. Like an admiration for Ed Sheeran.
We are inhibited from play, from phantasies and daydreams, by the demands and expectations of our society and our culture. Today we are much more accepting of adults at play than in Freud’s time, but the essence remains: when you get to your teens better man up, bury your lego or barbies and live in the “real world”. Go get yourself an education, a car, a mortgage, and a kid of your own. You can keep your “play world”, but in principle we don’t want to know about it. Unless… I’ll get back to that.
Freud considered phantasies to be quasi-realisations of unfulfilled or suppressed wishes. In other words a phantasy is a mere replacement of a wish that can’t be fulfilled in real life. So are dreams by the way, but we have some measure of control over our fantasies and daydreams. We can choose to not fantasize or daydream about certain things if they make us feel uncomfortable. The danger is that these daydreams then reappear at night, when we have no control over them. Freud was of the opinion that a happy man doesn’t need to fantasize, but I’m not sure I can agree with that. I do think that a happy man has no need for escapism. If life is so miserable that you constantly have to flee from it, be it through phantasy novels or drugs or sex or whatever, then perhaps it’s time to escape your life by making actual changes to it, rather than phantasizing about another life.
Let’s turn our attention back to poets, in the broader sense that I discussed earlier. I want to discuss specifically those poets whose work is not discussed in the literary supplement of highbrow newspapers and magazines because their work is not in the realm of art but in the realm of fantasy.
The stories I want to discuss are, for example, the ones with strong heroes: men or women you’d never meet in real life because they don’t exist. They fall from sky-scrapers, get run over by a train, cling to the landing gear of a plane or helicopter or drive their car off a cliff. They don’t just magically survive all this, but when you turn the page to the next chapter you find them in perfect health on a beach or in a bar, cocktail in hand, ready for their next adventure. Freud would have a field day with Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. If Freud had the pleasure of watching a few Bond movies, he would tell us that what we see is the “majesty of the ego” of Mr Fleming. That is to say Mr Bond is the product of Fleming’s fantasies of being the invincible hero we all admire and therefore want to be.
Other manifestations of ego-centric writing are when all the women in the story magically fall in love with the protagonist, or when there is a very clear distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.
Again, Dr Freud would have a field day with James Bond. He could probably pass his analysis as a patient’s report as well as a movie review.
Freud also mentions what he calls “psychological novels” in which the writer divides his own personality traits among his characters.
I would argue that, if well done, this mode of storytelling is defensible.
Ultimately no poet creates in a vacuum: he will always put something of his own history, psyche and environment in his work. Many writing manuals recommend this mode of working as “write what you know”. It’s a poet’s job to build a bridge between what he knows, his own “play-world”, and the real world. Caspar David Friedrich said that a painter should not just paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees inside him. If he doesn’t see anything inside him, he shouldn’t paint what he sees in front of him.
That’s true for poets too.
Now that I talked a little about phantasies and how they inspire writing, I’d like to take a detour from the psychology of Dr Freud and venture into the philosophy of Sir Roger Scruton.. Specifically I’d like to talk about the subtle difference between phantasy and imagination. As I explained, phantasies are a surrogate of what we desire.
As children we act out this phantasy, for example we take a box and pretend it’s a house.
As adults we add to our daydreams by watching pornography, or action movies like James Bond. One way or the other, they are psychological tools to fulfill a wish; our phantasies are a means to an end.
Now, if we say that a picture or a movie or a book leaves nothing to the imagination, that’s usually not a compliment. So there is an added value of imagination over phantasy, but how? Well, an imagined scene is not a surrogate for anything because the contemplation is an end in itself. If we consume art, for example if we look at a painting, we do so for its own sake, for the thing itself. In imagination there is art, in phantasy there isn’t. That’s not to say that reading a phantasy novel isn’t pleasant, I’m sure it can be, but it is not art, it is escapism. A phantasy or romance novel can be beautifully written, but it doesn’t have to be, because its aim is not to bring aesthetic pleasure but to relieve us of the burden of our miserable life.
The last James Bond movie, like any other, is about a man in a tuxedo sipping a Martini after he delivered the world from evil. On the contrary, the old man and the sea is nót about fishing. It is also not a manifestation of Hemingways phantasy of going fishing. He did plenty of that. It’s about his struggle with the sea, and the fish, and his own limitations.
Allow me to present you with another distinction: that of representation versus expression. Representation is presenting a world (real or our “play-world”) in a certain way. This representation allows for translation or paraphrasing: for example a picture of a fisherman will convey the same information as a painting, namely what a fisherman looks like. You could consider it a means to an end. It doesn’t say anything about the fisherman other than what he looks like.
Expression, on the other hand, is what conveys the fishermans desperation, his hope, his grit.
Representation is what’s written, expression is what we read between the lines.
You know how every writing book tells you to “show, don’t tell”? That’s what I’m talking about.
Representation deals with concepts, expression with emotions, intuitions, and experiences.
This is where the artistic value is. Art is the communication of these emotions, intuitions and experiences. It tells us something about the human condition. We can recognize ourselves in it, we can find beauty and meaning and consolation.
For this to happen, it needs to represent ánd express something worthwhile.
For thát to happen, the poet must transcend his phantasies in such a way that it becomes valuable to others. Valuable in the sense that we want to ponder it for its own sake, as an end in itself. We don’t consume art to get somewhere, because we’re already here, in the moment, with the beauty.
The difference between the common man and the poet is that the poet, through his talents and abilities, manages to express his phantasies (his “play-world”) in such a way that others can derive pleasure from it. How does he do that? Well, that’s the poet’s secret, but Freud alluded to two aspects of this secret.
One aspect is that the poet transforms his phantasy to make it appeal to a wider audience. Remember what I said earlier about that nobody wants to hear about your phantasies, unless? Think of the “fifty shades of gray” novels: it’s success lies in the revelation that the reader is not alone with her filthy phantasies. She finds a substitute for her own repressed phantasies in the phantasies of the poet. Because the poet took the sharp edges off his phantasies without making them so blunt that his writing became, well, blunt. It’s a thin line, and it’s the poet’s job to navigate it.
The second aspect is to deliver his phantasy in an aesthetically pleasing way, in other words by beautiful writing. What, if not beauty, is the hallmark of good writing? By writing beautifully a poet can describe the most awful events and still make us enjoy it. Think of the book “The Road”, by Cormack McCarthy, in which a father and son stumble through a post-apocalyptic world where people eat their own babies. We can take pleasure in the deliverance of what’s otherwise a horrible event. It’s a terribly bad thing delivered in a terribly good way. This is where the poet’s phantasies are no longer a means to an end but an end in itself.
This aesthetic pleasure, combined with the enrichment or confirmation of our phantasies by that of the poet, causes a relief in our soul. This psychic relief is the ultimate purpose of our reading and therefore the ultimate purpose of our writing. Fiction makes truth palpable, it’s the salt in our miserable existence.