Author's Response

I was gratified and stimulated by the varied comments that the contributors made about my essay. I cannot, of course,

answer all the points in detail, and shall confine myself to a few which struck me most.

Dr. Zeligs's approach to the subject, as he is well aware, is very different from mine. He accuses me of not taking into consideration “hard facts.” Indeed to my surprise he confesses himself unable to derive aesthetic enjoyment from The Spire because of his lack of background knowledge. He assumes that “extensive knowledge of medieval English history and religion” is a prerequisite for such enjoyment. If this indeed were so, our aesthetic experience would be very impoverished indeed. We could not read Proust without knowing that it is a roman à clef and the details of French social life at the turn of the century. Nor could we be moved by Goya's “The Second of May” without having first studied the Napoleonic wars. I think Dr. Zeligs and I have different views on the very nature of aesthetic experience. Dr. Zeligs also misunderstands the kind of essay I proposed to write. If it were my intention to produce a piece of literary criticism, the derivation and recorded historical background of the book would no doubt have been very important. He also accuses me of not taking into account the autobiographical facts about Golding. Here again he mistakes my intention; if it had been to describe Mr. Golding's personal problems, no doubt autobiographical data would be of the utmost interest and I could have started, say, with his essay “The Ladder and the Tree,” which is very relevant to the theme of The Spire. However, I do not find this approach very useful, and I think the autobiographical “hard facts” are usually not nearly hard enough, except in the case of a patient on the couch. What I aimed at is something quite different. It is my thesis—as I expounded it in my paper “A Psychoanalytic Contribution to Aesthetics”—that the work of art carries within it symbolicall