False Goddess, image by AC Evans
FEAR OF THE DARK
Fear of the Dark is a Modernistic
tendency in culture and the arts that rejects subjectivist forms and movements
such as Confessional Poetry, the workings of the Lyric Ego and Romantic
Individualism more generally.
Fear of the Dark is a phobic fear
of introversion and inwardness, sometimes disguised by would-be ascetics with
moral arguments against ‘self-indulgence’, 'egotism', the 'worship of false
gods' or ‘ivory tower’ aestheticism. In truth Fear of the Dark is a fear of the
psychic depths, fear of the uncanny, fear of the Shadow and the shadow world,
fear of the dark-side.
Anxious critics and commentators
who suffer from Fear of the Dark tend to privilege the Apollonian over the
Dionysian, the abstract over the figurative and to value the Classic over the
Romantic. At the same time they promote high-brow ideas of ‘elevated’ taste, ‘great’
traditions and cultural superiority. This fear is sometimes projected onto the
products of consumer society, of mass entertainment and mass production. Such
products are often treated with disdain, defined as Kitsch, denigrated as ‘decadence’
or, even condemned as idolatry.
Radical nonconformists may well
feel they are on an iconoclastic mission to cleanse the world of distracting
images and the products of the imagination. However, as Jung says, the Shadow
'cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness'.
Furthermore, this fear can also be transformed into hatred because it reminds
us of our 'helplessness and ineffectuality' in the face of the unknown – hence
the zealotry of puritans driven by a compulsive phobia – Fear of the Dark.
—AC Evans
