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Writers experience language differently. Some writers seem to be acutely aware of the otherness of language, and fascinated by it as an object in the world with its own structure and organization. In their writing, they explore its rules and conventions, its syntax and spelling. They are fascinated, one might say, with the games that can be played with language. Other writers do not seem to be as aware of language as a separate object in the world, an object which is over and against them and which they must confront. They do not see language but move in it as though in a medium of which they are not fully conscious.
For the most part, psychoanalytic interpretations of literature have focussed on the fantasies involved in the content of the work, and have asked why it is that particular themes and pre occupations occur in a particular writer's work. They have asked what wishes are being fulfilled in a writer's presentation of his fantasies. However, we can also ask what wishes are being fulfilled in the act of writing itself, and what fantasies are involved in the writer's relationship to his language.
The Letter of Lord Chandos by Hugo von Hofmannsthal is a description of a writer's experience of his literary creativity and his loss of that creativity.1 It is a literary work, the content of which is a description of a particular experience of language, so it is a text well-suited to the examination of these questions, at least in relation to one writer.