The Existentialist Experience in Literature

Art: Andrew Baines

Symbolism in Religion and Literature

By Rollo May

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All the great charismatic seers of modern literature from Baudelaire to Kafka and from Pirandello to Faulkner have, in one way or another, wanted us to understand that we are lost in a dark wood and that, in this maze, what is least trustworthy is the common, the immediate, the familiar.

Thus the motion the modern artist has often performed before the revolving universe has been a motion of recoil. Sometimes, like Rimbaud, he has fallen in love with what Jacques Maritain calls "the blind glitter of nothingness" and made of his art a kind of incantatory magic. Or, like the author of Finnegans Wake, sometimes he has decided himself to be God and to create ex nihilo a universe of his own.