Zweig’s Obsessive Protagonists

 

 

     Apart from folk stories, most ancient and medieval narratives concerned gods or aristocrats undergoing major upheavals.  Novel writers found drama then in bourgeois and sometimes even proletarian milieux.  By the time of Chekhov overt drama came to seem unnecessary.  Character could be revealed by the smallest of events, a vague impression, a velleity, a trivial accident.  With the insights of Freud the significance of matters of apparently little consequence emerged, justifying attention to details that could sometimes generate major crises.

     Stefan Zweig was a good friend of Freud’s, corresponding with him and visiting for decades.  In a letter of October 21, 1932, Zweig wrote: “Everything that I write bears your influence and perhaps you can tell that the strength to tell the truth, possibly the essential element in my work, is due to you.  You have provided a model for an entire generation.” [1]  Zweig’s stories depict more or less ordinary protagonists, driven by one stimulus or another into odd and extreme cathexes, producing overmastering obsessive-compulsive behaviors that come to dominate their lives.

     In the world of Stefan Zweig’s stories, a façade of stable respectability (not unlike that that marked most of Freud’s patients) masks turbulent emotions, usually erotic, that prove uncontrollable and ultimately ruinous.  The psychoanalytic influence is evident, but in no formulaic application but rather in the general sense of a more or less calm-looking ego fronting, as long as possible, for a cyclonic id.  In one novelle after another the reader finds minds in extremis, helpless to manage obsession.  Whether the psychological structure mirrors the apparent cultured bourgeois satisfaction of the Vienna of the author’s youth thrown into the madness of Nazism or not is debatable, but the parallel seems apt.

     In Zweig’s “Chess Story” (“Schachnovelle”) the political analogy is explicit as the protagonist is forced into a kind of madness by Nazi persecution.   To escape the irrational lunacy of a criminal government, he mentally retreats to the ordered if competitive world of the chess, a realm entirely abstract and idealized, empty equally of virtue and wickedness.  The ego is entirely overpowered by his absorption in this world of the mind, producing a total breakdown.

     In “The Man who Ran Amok” (“Amoklaufer”) a doctor already strained by long service in a tropical colony hesitates to perform an illegal abortion for a respectable lady who consults him.  When she then dies after resorting to a back-alley practitioner, he is overcome with regret and himself commits suicide.  Doubtless his reaction would have been milder had his sensitive nerves not been affected by long colonial service, but he is also aware that his initial rejection of her request was in part due to his resentment of her position among the elite.  Thus it is his own inhumanity rather than her suffering that disturbs him.  The use of the Malay term amok highlights the fact that the cultivated European is every bit as capable of mad behavior as the Asian tribesman.

     In both these stories there is a narrative frame; the story is told to another character as though to hear it directly from the mouth of the neurotic would be too agonizing.  The frame stories insulate the reader from too hot a point of passion, placing the reader at a safe remove from the mental maelstrom of the protagonists.

     “The Burning Secret” (“Brennendes Geheimnis”) has a simple third person omniscient narrator.  The main character is a baron identified as a “ladykiller” (“Frauenjäger”) who pursues liaisons as a sort of sport.  Cynically cultivating a relationship with the son of a lady in whom he is interested, he offends the child who, realizing he is simply being used, resolves to frustrate the would-be lover.  Here the main character experiences only frustration from his compulsive and selfish romancing.  Though powered by the dynamo of erotic desire, the baron’s game is in fact altogether ego-centered.  Such men as he “are always burdened with passion, but not that of a lover, rather that of a player, cold, calculating, and dangerous.” [2]  With his thoughtless attempt to use the child Edgar, the baron condemns his own project.  If he cannot bear to be alone [3], it is perhaps because he feels so strongly the ugliness of his own soul.

    “Angst” (“Fear” or “Anxiety), the single word that best defines the Zeitgeist of the first half of the twentieth century, is the title of a Novelle with a typical bourgeoise as protagonist.  She resembles a case study by Freud with her comfortable, respectable home and social standing.  Yet her sexual desire leads her to an affair that she might have initially considered a mere peccadillo but which comes to occupy her constantly, bringing ceaseless anxiety.  A surprise twist in the end produces what might seem even more surprising: a somewhat optimistic ending. 

 

She distinctly recognized the boy’s voice and felt surprised how much it was like his father’s.  A gentle smile came to her lips and rested there quietly.  With eyes closed she lay that she might all the more deeply enjoy the thought of what her life was and her happiness as well.  There remained a bit of pain within but it was a promising one, glowing and yet mild, just as wounds burn before they scar over for good. 

 

     The first-person narrator of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” (“Brief einer Unbekannten”) has dedicated her entire life since the age of thirteen to her passion for a writer, though he is never really aware of her existence.  She says “I will tell you my whole life, that truly began only on the day that I came to know you.” [5]  She even bears him a child that dies as she does as well, without his ever recognizing her.  She describes her passion as dominating her entirely, “hopeless, servile, submissive,” and as “slavish, dog-like, and devoted.” [6]  Clearly she suffers from what an observer would call an obsessive, abnormal fixation, yet to her it is altogether inevitable and even the writer, for whom she has not existed until she had died, seems in the end to accept the love-offering. 

 

He could feel a death and an immortal love.  Something broke internally in his soul and he thought of that invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate like music in the distance. [7]

 

     In each of these stories someone is driven by overpowering emotion to a desperate state of mind.  In most cases the impetus is sexual, though the chess player responding to unjust imprisonment is an exception. [8]  For Zweig civilization and rationality are shallow and deceptive and the ego is in the last analysis impotent, unable to control the passions.  In the past Zweig was once very highly thought of, particularly toward the end of his lifetime (though a rediscovery has occurred in recent years on a small scale), but he has always had his critics.  A reviewer finds him “fake” and “stiltedly extreme,” a “schematic grand guignol.”  The author himself admits to a “preference . . . for intense, intemperate characters.” [9]  Perhaps the reader must have at least glimpsed a life out of control to realize that the irrational is as central to our minds’ operation as what we generally consider to be logic, and for the most part more so.  Zweig’s artful prose describes the psychic disorder that can an any moment overcome even those who seem the most sensible and proper among us.  The author’s suicide during World War II suggests that the danger of such mental storms does not belong to fiction alone.

 

 

1.  “In Alles was ich schreibe ist von Ihnen beeindruckt und vielleicht spȗren Sie, dass der Mut zur Wahrhaftigkeit, der möglicherweise das Wesentliche meiner Bücher ist, von  Ihnen stammt: Sie haben ein ganzen Generation ein Vorbild gegeben.”

2.  “Sie sind immer geladen mit Leidenschaft, aber nicht der des Liebenden, sondern der des Spielers, der kalten, berechnenden und gefährlichen.”

3.  “Although he was not lacking in inner resources, he had an entirely sociable nature, and his nature was entirely sociable for which he was well-liked and his inability to be alone was well-known.”  (“Er war, obwohl innerer Befähigung nicht entbehrend, eine durchaus gesellschaftliche Natur, als solche beliebt, in allen Kreisen gern gesehen und sich seiner Unfähigkeit zur Einsamkeit voll bewußt.”)

4.  “Deutlich erkannte sie die Stimme des Knaben und spürte erstaunt zum erstenmal, wie sehr sie der seines Vaters glich. Leise flog ein Lächeln auf ihre Lippen und rastete dort still. Mit geschlossenen Augen lag sie, um all dies tiefer zu genießen, was ihr Leben war und nun auch ihr Glück. Innen tat noch leise etwas weh, aber es war ein verheißender Schmerz, glühend und doch lind, so wie Wunden brennen, ehe sie für immer vernarben wollen.”

 5.  “Mein ganzes Leben will ich Dir verraten, dies Leben, das wahrhaft erst begann mit dem Tage, da ich Dich kannte.”

 6.  “Hoffnungslos, so dienend, so unterwürfig,” and “sklavisch, so hündisch, so hingebungsvoll geliebt.”

 7.  “Er spürte einen Tod und spürte unsterbliche Liebe: innen brach etwas auf in seiner Seele, und er dachte an die Unsichtbare körperlos und leidenschaftlich wie an eine ferne Musik.”

8.  The doctor in “The Man who Ran Amok” originally acts out of pride, but many readers, especially those inclined toward Freud, will see eros in the immediate background.

9.  Michael Hofmann “Vermicular Dither,” London Review of Books XXXII:2  (28 January, 2010). 

Morning Glories on the Make

 

     Why are flowers universally considered beautiful?  Though a functional part of nature, enabling sexual reproduction, flowers are favorite images in poetry and visual art in all parts of the world.  As compared with leaves or stems, they are, of course, showy things, with extravagant forms, colors, and even fragrances all of which are considered attractive.  Surely, for one who suspects that aesthetics derives from functional use, flowers may be significant to people’s survival, though they are rarely eaten, because they are the promise of fruit to come.   As the flowering parts are sexual organs, the plants, it seems, are flaunting their reproductive capacity in the most flamboyant display possible.  Flowers bring the pleasure of a reinforced confidence that nature is percolating with vigor throughout, and that, on the most basic level, dinners need never cease.  Their showy sexuality is the dynamo propelling fertility.  Unsurprisingly, flowers have become part of the imagery and the social practice of romantic love, from “I am the Rose of Sharon” to contemporary St. Valentine’s Day marketing.  In nature the flowers’ reproductive organs communicate with other flowers as well as with birds, insects, and humans.  The faith of the flower in a generation to come is expressed in overdetermination to the point of glory.  

     The birds attracted to this floral display have their own costumes and rituals to celebrate their own affairs.  Such behavior is familiar to everyone who watches nature films.  The inconvenience of the peacock’s magnificent tail is undeniable at all times when the bird is not engaged in courting.  The bowerbirds not only build elaborate structures; they decorate them with shiny or brightly colored objects and perform dance movements to attract females.  Male jumping spiders twist their bodies to display colored or iridescent hairs (the most spectacular is called the peacock spider) while hopping about seductively and singing in distinctive tones.  Some have areas of ultraviolet reflectance which they also flaunt just as some flowers attract bird visitors through similar ultraviolet flashes).  Even the ordinary house fly cavorts before his love object with the hope of soliciting the female’s cooperation.  Egg-laying is the functional goal of the blue-footed boobies’ dance, or the solemn movements of pirouetting sandhill cranes, or Costa’s hummingbirds swooping and diving and then suddenly flashing a startling display of radially symmetrical purple face feathers, yet what the animal does is only secondarily, one might say symbolically, related to reproduction, rather like human fetishes. 

     Nature employs symbols to perpetuate itself, and it infuses those symbols with ostentatious passion by using the brightest colors, the most inventive forms, the most conspicuous cues.  The birds are surely expressing enthusiasm; I suspect the flowers may be as well.     

     Reproduction is the Aristotelean final cause of all this folderol, but the practical seems all but lost in magnificent symbolic clothing.  If the drive to pass on their DNA is what leads animals and plants to express themselves so creatively, one might suspect a similar goal lies at the root of human art.  While it may be undeniable that many artists have successfully pursued sexual variety, it remains unclear whether they developed their skills in order to provide variety in the bedroom. 

     I once witnessed a festival in Ogwa in Edo State, Nigeria in which, accompanied only by percussion of a drum ensemble, individual young men took turns doing acrobatic dances not unlike breakdancing that surely were meant here not only to satisfy the local deities but also to impress the young women of their acquaintance.  Though such an outright connection is rare, to Freud not only art but energy in general originates in the libido.  In a classic essay in 1910 he argued that the work of Leonardo da Vinci was entirely the result of sublimation after he had recoiled in horror from his own sexuality. 

     But can it be called sublimation when so often eros is explicitly invoked in art?  Vast amounts of love poetry have been produced (though in volume it may yet be outweighed by religious poetry).  I once worked in a prison library where a book in high demand, kept safely behind the counter, was called Pearls of Love.  It was a collection of romantic poetry from which the inmates copied warm passages to include in letters to their lovers.  Were the countless sculptures of naked women from the Venus of Willendorf to Jeff Koons’ Woman in Tub created from purely aesthetic motives?  Would Venus look equally beautiful to an alien who reproduces through budding? 

     Most would agree that a hungry person is unduly influenced by circumstance, who quite sincerely, while salivating, thinks that a photograph of a beefsteak the most beautiful thing in the world.  One suspects that the judgement would not survive a good meal.  Yet eros can hardly fail to be present when one person regards a figure of another. 

    Some artists are emphatic.  Van Gogh said, “There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” To Klimt “all art is erotic” and those who most appreciate his work might be likely to agree, while Picasso is said to have oracularly declared “sex and art are the same.”  Matisse said in an interview that “Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love.”  A link between artistic practice and appeal as a lover is encoded in popular art as well including Burgess Meredith’s character in That Uncertain Feeling, Lute the “troubadour” in the comic strip Hägar the Horrible, and the macho posturing of heavy metal guitarists.

    Even if the theme of a poem, painting, dance, or tune has nothing whatever to do with love or sexuality, surely in art where the maker like a god shapes a small universe with a free hand such a fundamental human element of nature must be present.   Just as dreams often take a sexual turn, the fantasies that we have learned to project for each other’ amusement, our art, is inevitably lit with some level of erotic glow.  Every text has a sexual meaning, just as every text might be read psychologically, or metaphysically, or socially, or self-reflectively, yet, for most humans, the sexual interpretation may have a certain primacy, an inside track.  Perhaps among us hominids who like to think of ourselves as “higher,” just as among the birds and the bees and the flowering plants, art is a secondary sexual characteristic.

Dreams

 

I omit references within the text as this is a familiar essay, far from a scholarly one.   My readers will have noticed that I am hardly a nice observer of the distinction, though, and I have decided to append a general list of a few sources unnamed in the body of the piece, many of which are well-known. 

 

     Sir Thomas Browne observes in his excellent essay on dreams “that some have never dreamed is as improbable as that some have never laughed.”  People all dream nightly, and thus may act as gods, creating worlds, or at least as artists, spinners of gossamer fictions with such delicacy that they fall to pieces and vanish after the eyes have opened.  This evidence of the fundamental human need for narrative is reconfirmed daily by everyone’s experience, but there is no more agreement about the best use for these products of the imagination than for their cousins emerging from the more conscious areas of the brain, the short stories in a literary quarterly.

     Perhaps the evanescent quality of dreams (in which way they contrast with the author’s hopes of eternal life on the page at least) has a fortunate aspect.  Though fascinating to the dreamer, laden with significant detail and accompanied by urgent emotion, dreams generally cannot survive retelling.  There is little so boring as someone else’s dream.  Even great writers like Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac cannot sustain reader’s interest in unprocessed records of nighttime fantasies.  Yet dreams have such beguiling appeal to the dreamer that they seem as though they surely must bear consequential information. 

     In Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale” the rooster Chantecleer, deeply troubled by a dream, groans, fearing, correctly, as it turns out, that his dream of a predator presages an actual attack.  His lady Pertelote reproves him, saying “vanitee in sweven is.”  She offers a physiological explanation, suggesting that dreams arise from overeating, a notion she shares with Winsor McKay whose comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was wholly composed of nightmares occasioned by overindulgence.  A good medieval polemicist, the hen cites the authority of Cato who discounted the significance of dreams. 

     More people over the years have agreed with the rooster than with his consort.  It is certainly the more stimulating and productive position, though heavy dinners late at night may play their own role.   Very many around the world and all through time have like Chanticleer thought dreams contain clues to future events.  The Bible is full of dream interpreters of this sort.    

     In Genesis Joseph no sooner says that interpreting dreams “belongs to God,” then he offers to do the job himself.  He accurately decodes the dreams of his fellow prisoners, with nice symmetry predicting that one will be freed and the other executed.  Neither of the dreams, though, directly portrays the destined outcome; through what Browne had called “symbolicall adaptation” three branches must be read as three days and birds munching bread as birds picking flesh from a corpse.  Thus, while dreams are considered to reveal the future, they do so only indirectly, obliquely, symbolically, after the manner of art. 

     In a depiction of Israel’s utopian future once the nation is properly observant, God promises not only to defeat their military enemies (as well as a plague of locusts), but also that “your old men shall dream dreams,” a promise repeated for Christians in the account of Pentecost.  Yet, in spite of the potential of revelation, it is sometimes difficult to discern the difference between God’s voice and a lie.  Jeremiah warns that false prophets may mislead the people declaring, “I have dreamed.”  After all, as Zecharaiah tells, the priests of other deities also offer dream visions.  “For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams.”  Islam likewise distinguished between the divinely inspired true dream (al-ru’ya) and the false dream, which may come from the devil, though many dreams are considered meaningless and inconsequential (hulm).

     The need for acute discernment in the interpretation of dreams has led to professional training in the skill by shamans and priests.   In many cultures the very dreaming of significant dreams is a task undertaken by specialists.  Not only have psychedelics (called by some in this context entheogens) been useful for vision-seekers, many cultures use psychotropic drugs specifically for the purpose of achieving more lucid dreams.  For instance, the Chonal people of Oaxaca use Calea ternifolia, called in English dream grass and the Xhosa people use Silene undulata, or African dream root.

     Belief in the predictive value of dreams has withered in modern times, though it like astrology survives in vulgar forms such as the pulp publication 1000 Dreams and what they mean (1944), attributed to Yohanna ibn al Farmouzi, and the Gypsy's Witch Dream Book of Numbers (1972).  The latter, in a sign of the decadence of the genre it shares with some fortune cookies, reduces all dreams to numbers of interest only to gamblers.  

    In recent times the interpretation of dreams has turned from divination to psychology, or, to use the mythic imagery of Freud’s Vergilian epigraph for The Interpretation of Dreams, from the heavens to the underworld.  Most moderns would assent to Freud’s declaration that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, though the use of dreams in therapeutic practice has declined precipitously along with the rest of the psychoanalytic system, in spite of the quondam assent of Freud’s colleagues such as Jung who maintained, “who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”  Today, of course, a psychiatrist, after having observed the patient’s general demeanor, is likely to be primarily a prescriber of pills, leaving the talk therapy not to psychologists, but to social workers.  The doctor may never hear a patient’s dream.

    The revelation that narrative action in  a literary text has occurred in a dream has been derided as too convenient a convention, yet it has honorably used by writers including Li Gongzuo in "A Lifetime in a Dream," Chaucer whose Book of the Duchess is built around two dreams, and Langland whose Piers Plowman has an even more elaborate dream architecture.  Everyone knows of the sudden appearance of the white rabbit in a waistcoat to Alice in her doze on the riverbank and of Dorothy’s being carried off to Munchkin Country and eventually Oz before each young heroine awakens again to everyday reality.  The device is used in a good many less-remembered works such as Fritz Lang’s 1944 The Woman in the Window in which as in Oz some characters from the waking world appear in dream roles.  I consider the episode of Marge’s Little Lulu outstanding in which Tubby is pleased when he rises from bed (in dream) to find himself with a moustache but before his second awakening into the security of his accustomed world, he finds himself pursued by an outraged mob crying “little boys can’t have moustaches!” 

     Dreams may convey an entire vision, a world-view.  The most celebrated dreamer of this sort is likely Zhuang Zhou who dreamed he was a butterfly and, upon awakening, pondered whether he might not as likely be a butterfly dreaming he was a man as a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly.  (Oddly, Socrates makes exactly the same point in a passage clear and casual if more abstract and less artful.)  Such epistemological questioning of reality seems to express skepticism like that of the Pyrrhonists, but there is no equivalence between the insect and human consciousness.  During the dream Zhang had been “flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased,” whereas upon rising he fell to uneasy self-conscious cogitation.  It is a smaller Fall from grace perhaps to lose the wings of a butterfly than to be exiled from Eden, but the trajectory is similar.  From the wholly involved but free participation in a natural spontaneous life such as we imagine animals to experience we have descended to the neurotic human psyche, prey to guilt, doubt, and self-questioning.

     Liezi describes a dream of the time the Yellow Emperor wore himself out with governing.  He devoted himself to his duties and at the same time indulged in sensual pleasures until, finding that his “ravaged flesh darkened and his dulled senses were stupefied, he concluded that attachment to himself and to the kingdom were both destructive.  He went into retirement, neglecting matters of state and living like an ascetic.  At this point he had a dream of the utopian land of Hua Hsü where people “have no cravings and lusts.” There “all men follow their natural course” and they have never heard of “profit and loss.”  They have thereby gained an extraordinary sensation of liberation, expressing by Liezi as “the ability to ride space as though walking the solid earth.” This same Yellow Emperor was said to appoint officials based on verbal clues in dreams and to him was ascribed a book of dream interpretation. 

     My own dreams seem rarely to rise to the economy and clarity, not to mention the significance, of these dreams, but of course examples from written sources are generally composed or literary dreams.  Even those reported by physicians such as Freud and Jung seem to many critics to be artificially pruned to reinforce the author’s general theories.  I experience neither divine openings nor the terror of nightmares.  Many times I have found myself in a semi-familiar area, a campus or a city neighborhood having extraordinary difficulty making my way to my destination.  I turn a corner and see an unexpected territory yet to be traversed or a make a short cut through a university building only to find it a maze of corridors.  I feel the mildest frustration.  What can be the purpose of such a fantasy?   Having been student or instructor most of my life, I have often found my dream persona unprepared sometimes for attending, sometimes for teaching a class, though again without much anxiety.  “Ah, well,” I would think, “I have three papers due tomorrow, but two can be submitted late and it will be easy to do the third tonight.”   Or I would improvise a lecture I could deliver without the students’ having read any specific text.  The mildness of my dreams is consistent.  I like many have also imagined myself without pants or without clothes in public places, but others seem not to notice.  The unconscious is often conceived as a roaring beast, but mine seems thoroughly domesticated.

     On several occasions, for months at a time, I have set out a notebook on the night table to record my dreams and I have definitely observed that putting this sort of conscious attention on dreams alters them considerably.  They become far easier to recall, more coherent, and more weighty with the meaning I sought.  Probably the Lakota in a sweat lodge will experience what he has been taught and what he has observed in the practice of others.  A Cameroonian educated in France told me that a snake would visit him in the night to advise him.  As a member of the snake clan it was no more than he expected.  Thus I am confident a Freudian or a Jungian would rapidly acquire the knack of dreams congenial to expectations.    

     It may be, in fact, that our deepest sleep represents at once an unerring prediction of the future and a philosophic cue.  Decades ago the Dalai Lama addressed the great American populace through People magazine saying, in what is his most achievable suggestion if not the most lofty, “Sleep is the best meditation.”  The Vedanta Hindu tradition identifies the waking state with the gross body and the sleeping state with the subtle body.  The deeper sleep in which consciousness is eliminated altogether, the non-REM sleep is identified with the absolute.  (In the familiar way of philosophic one-upmanship, some authors include a fourth state as the final one, at once transcending and underlying the other three.)   Thus samadhi, far from being a remote and mysterious state of consciousness, is experienced by everyone nightly.  While such emptiness may be the source and end of everything, and indeed nirvana means “blown out, extinguished” it is nonetheless far less engaging than the dreams that can dominate our attention at one moment and vanish in a moment.  Dreams seem, like much of what we experience, to mean what we wish for them to mean.

 

 

Sources

Browne, “On Dreams;” Genesis 40:8, Joel 2:28, Acts 2:17, Jeremiah 23:25, Zecharaiah 10:2; Gianluca Toro and Benjamin Thomas, foreword by Jonathan Ott, Drugs of the Dreaming: Oneirogens: Salvia divinorum and Other Dream-Enhancing Plants; Carl Jung, Letters; Plato, Theaetetus; Zhuang Zhou, The Book of Lieh-tzu; Huangfu Mi, Records of Emperors and Kings, Mandukya Upanishad.

Kurt Seligmann’s Riddlesome Symbols

A shorter version of this essay prefaces the forthcoming third Seligmann lecture to be published by the Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf. Each is available from the Center or through me for $15.


     The use of symbols outlined by Kurt Seligmann in his lecture on the topic explicitly seeks to contribute to expand the term’s definition, though his opinions rest securely on nearly a hundred years of scholarly elucidation of symbolic meaning in traditional contexts. While Seligmann’s view of symbols does give a nod to Surrealist ideas, it in fact deviates considerably from that advanced by Breton, and in the end he proposes a method for renewing old symbols for use in the twentieth century distinctly his own, while incorporating the insights of philologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and literary critics.
     Greek and Roman mythology had long been included in the European curriculum, but systematic knowledge and comparison of other symbolic systems only began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Nineteenth century writers like J. J. Bachofen mined the expanding fund of knowledge of antiquity to posit an early stage of matriarchy while William Robertson Smith found significant parallels between ancient Hebrew and other ancient Semitic beliefs. While the “higher criticism” sought to place Christianity in its Near Eastern context, scholars like Max Müller and Heinrich Zimmer were bringing the West its first accurate knowledge of Asian texts.
     At the same time pioneering work described and analyzed the cultures of what were called “primitive” societies. Edward Burnett Tylor, Oxford’s first professor of anthropology, distinguished between “savagery,” and “barbarism” on the route toward civilization, and James Frazer undertook the first comprehensive study of myths and rituals worldwide, published in The Golden Bough and elsewhere. [1]
     Attempts to organize and meaningfully relate the new information coming from the study of Babylon, India, and China, as well as the forests of New Guinea and the Amazon, followed. Meanwhile the foundations of the study of semiotics, of signs in general, were being established by C. S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure.
     The Surrealists, on the other hand, had little interest in the use of pre-existing symbols. In his 1924 Manifesto Breton suggests the child, the madman, and especially the dreamer as models of the imaginative subject, but never refers to myth or suggests the re-use of any existing symbolic image. Indeed, his entire emphasis is on the generation of inscrutable new objects for contemplation. Furthermore, such Surrealist images (devised in a “hypnagogic state”) do not fit a pattern of symbol and meaning, but rather a new model: “two distant realities” united to form a new one in which “the more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.” Breton privileges “previously neglected associations” and “the disinterested play of thought,” and absolutely opposes convention and tradition. Through such newly-coined images, whose meaning is obscure if not ineffable, “we can hope that mysteries which are not really mysteries will give way to the great Mystery.” [2] The most significant techniques for developing such material are first, the linking of unlikely pairs, resulting in a new semantic field and second, the use of aleatory methods to generate ideas entirely independent of both the past and conscious thought.
     The Surrealist attitude is succinctly expressed by René Crevel’s unequivocal statement: “Poetry which delivers us of the symbol sows liberty itself.” [3] The recommended Surrealist practice may be illustrated by the editing of Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou during which “no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation would be accepted." According to Buñuel, "we had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why." According to its maker (retaining his own emphatic capitals) “NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING.” [4]
     Seligmann regards this Surrealist position as delusory. He begins his lecture by citing a number of symbols the meanings of which are “established by convention,” though even at this point he notes that interpretation is dynamic, changing through time. Surely he is thinking of his Surrealist colleagues when he observes that, “many an artist of today wishes to break completely with the past.” This cannot be done because the artist must have a public and “the only conciliator between him and the public . . . is precisely the symbol.” The symbol always represents at least a partial conjunction of what is signified by the sign-maker and what is understood by the sign-reader. Thus, the symbols of Surrealism “may seem at first glance to be entirely new creations. Close scrutiny, however, reveals their ties with the past.”
     According to Seligmann one cannot rid oneself of semantic associations even when contemplating abstract forms. Though the non-figurative painter may abolish all conscious symbols, the unconscious is “ineradicable.” He says that “psychoanalysis has shown that all symbols . . .are signs arisen from the depths of our psyche.” Thus abstract paintings can be “read” though they lack explicit symbols because of this unconscious content in which “public and the artist meet upon common psychic ground.” Even a modernist’s “freely invented forms” are “not just a private affair” as they cannot escape this collective psychic base.
     Furthermore, symbols are not only common to all humanity, they are in part consistent through history. The artist sounds very much like Jung when he discusses certain symbols the meaning of which “is deeply rooted in our psyches,” symbols that express “lasting ideas” will persist through the centuries. From a basic reassurance that the cosmos is orderly (and even just!) to the details of ritual, symbolic usage has always comforted humans with “the signs of civilization.” According to Seligmann “in times of uncertainty” (including his own era) “an uncanny profusion of images” will be produced in an effort to seize some control over circumstance.
     According to Seligmann “tradition and convention” had always governed the reading of symbolic language, but along with clearly significant symbols, artists used as well archaic ones whose meaning had been largely lost, and these “mysterious” symbols came to be regarded as more magical, among them the attributes of Abraxas. Such underdetermined symbols, as the Symbolist poets recognized, potentially are more powerful than those with clearly assigned meaning.
     Seligmann notes as well that intuitive symbols may arise naturally in the mind of the artist or the consumer of art and yet still be associated with pre-existing symbolic associations. Though such symbols are “direct,” spontaneous, not prescribed but “from personal emotions,” they remain related to earlier patterns of symbolic significance. Similar notions had already been developed by psychologists who found insight into the minds of their patients in exotic myths and rituals. Freud, to whom the Surrealists owed so much, quoted literary texts and classical myths to support his view of the dreams and fantasies he encountered in his practice. [5]
     Even more important for Seligmann in his revaluation of the relevance of ancient symbols for modern man were surely the works of his fellow Swiss C. G. Jung who proposed the notion of a collective unconscious [6] in which were recorded not merely instincts but also archetypes. Jung delighted in exactly the same sort of symbolic religious, alchemical, and occult texts that Seligmann collected, and for both authors the illustrations were of primary interest.
     Discounting the value of the chance conjunctions beloved by the Surrealists, Seligmann nonetheless finds particular significance in somewhat indeterminate symbols. According to him, though all symbols had at first a set coded meaning, some had become more “mysterious” as time passed, and these were particularly likely to acquire occult uses. He persists in recognizing what he several times calls “riddlesome” symbols as the most fruitful.
     Seligmann, while accepting a general position on symbols less radical than orthodox Surrealism would propose, nonetheless insisted upon maintaining his own idiosyncratic fascination with magic. According to him certain powerful symbols “do not only reflect, they also emanate ideas.” If the meaning of those words is far from clear, the artist then explains that such symbols “assume talismanic power” and illustrates by the case of the Star of David used in occult operations as the Seal of Solomon. He suggests that a visual or written collective production of the sort called “exquisite corpse” may result in a “riddlesome emblem.”
     More dramatically, Seligmann recounts the story of Victor Brauner who had represented himself with only one eye long before he lost an eye in an accident. To Seligmann his intuitive precognition is bound up with a symbol rich in parallels such as Oedipus and Cyclops. These occult claims have little effect on his aesthetics, either in theory or practice, though they do contribute a note of sensation and a vague background of imminent portentous significance. He slides here from Brauner’s story to the myths of the sort that inform his ultimate world view: alchemical procedures, the worm ouroboros, and the philosophical challenge to dualism, all firmly based in earlier symbolic systems.
     In fact, Seligmann only modifies the view of symbols as signs with a conventional meaning by reinforcing the observations of Freud and Jung that the very same symbols sometimes occur to individuals independent of tradition and by his recognition that some symbols have partly or wholly indeterminate meanings. His fascination with symbols in magical use and in non-European cultures deviates from Breton’s Surrealist orthodoxy, and his acceptance of such procedures as the “exquisite corpse” seems designed primarily to please his colleagues in the movement, fitting awkwardly as it does with his historical investigations. A survey of Seligmann’s visual work indicates a lack of dependence on aleatory techniques and instead a consistent use of myth and symbol from the past including paintings representing Baal and Astarte, Melusine, Clio, Leda, Cybele, Amphitrite, Sphinx and Minotaur as well as works featuring motifs from Carnival and heraldry. Seligmann’s images, for all their distortions and individuality, are firmly rooted in European history. Rather than adopting the pose of rejecting the past, he has indeed made it new.


1. Other scholars associated with his methods including Jane Ellen Harrison, F.M. Cornford, Gilbert Murray and A. B. Cook revolutionized the study of Classics by noting similarities between ancient Greek and Roman beliefs and those of other peoples.

2. The French Symbolist poets likewise recognized the power of underdetermined symbols. Note too, the similarity to the koan used by some schools of Zen.

3. From L’Esprit contre la raison.

4. Luis Buñuel, “Notes on the Making of Chien Andalou,” in Art in Cinema, ed. Frank Stauffacher (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1947), 29-30.

5. In his New Introductory Lessons on Psychoanalysis, Freud explicitly says, “In such cases confirmations from elsewhere - from philology, folklore, mythology or ritual - were bound to be especially welcome.” He proceeds then to provide examples.

6. Jung first used the term in "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (1929).