Crushed by reality?
In a speech given at the 2002 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards last night, the scholar, writer, and sinologist Pierre Ryckmans asked whether psychotherapists multiply when novelists and poets become scarce. He answered his own question by quoting Jung:
“Man’s estrangement from the mythical realm and the subsequent shrinking of his existence to the mere factual - that is the major cause of mental illness.” In other words, people who do not read fiction or poetry are in permanent danger of crashing against facts and being crushed by reality. And then, in turn, it is left to Dr Jung and his colleagues to rush to the rescue and attempt mending the broken pieces.
Feeling like you’re crashing against too many facts? Last week Norm Jensen pointed to this list of “the 100 best works of fiction, alphabetically by author, as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries.”
Needless to say, I was delighted that The Tale of Genji and Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain are included.
