Narcissus and the artist

I came across an interesting or bizarre comment – however you want to look at it – the other day that poetry is narcissistic. The commenter thought that every poet writes about themselves and things that are only happening to them. From a personal point of view, I think I’d be a great cure for insomnia if that was the case!

So is everyone who creates something just writing about themselves?

Is everyone who is an artist or creates anything at all a narcissist?

By extension, is a story writer a narcissist? Are all those characters just the writer in disguise, acting out echoes of their own life?

Is a songwriter – and I think of songs as poems with a chorus – just a narcissist writing about their own experience and nothing else?

Is an architect a narcissist in designing a building? Is it just a big replica of his…?

Is a painter always painting a reflection of themselves or their own life?

Is a director always imitating himself in his movies?

Where does that leave the autobiographer? Mega narcissist?

And are parents who create a child the ultimate narcissists, creating something in their own image?

Well, of course not.

It’s quite funny really when you think about it.

With a story of fiction, it’s pretty obvious who the characters are. They usually have names. But then some are written in the first-person ‘I’ and that isn’t the author. Poetry runs the same. The ‘I’ in a poem is not always the author. With some writers, the ‘I’ is never the author, sometimes it is, and I guess for some, it might always be. But a lot of the time, the ‘I’ is a character made up by the poet – the Everyman or Everywoman, the existential being. Like fiction. If the ‘I’ gets too big for his boots, the author can always bump him off. And some poems head into the abstract, representing something else. Others are like little paintings of scenes.

In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter who was known for his beauty and loved everything beautiful. He was proud, looked down on those who loved him, and in the end he fell in love with his own reflection in a stream, laid down next to it, stayed there and died of thirst. (I love Ovid!)

So, there you go. Feeling thirsty?

You’ve created something. You’re an artist. Are you therefore a narcissist?

Nope.