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The “Real” phase in literature and art can be likened to “realism” but is even more literal than that, “realism” is simply a form of artistic expression that heralds a drying up of creative capacity and a desiccation of the realm of Real Life of any enchantment (thread)
This phase comes after the Mirror phase in that a subject, or a culture, as become aware of itself *as* a self, which is to say the subject now perceives the disparate and distinct factors that combine to create its impression of reality. This fractures it’s ontology and leaves..
it (the subject) stranded or isolated in a world of competing perspectives. It now becomes the task of the subject to reconstruct a whole & intact persona, not just as a Self but an integrated whole *with* its environment. This is Jungs “Individuation”
This reconstruction of an impression of oneself fully embedded in a world is characterized by Jung as a synthesizing of unconscious or symbolic contents of ones world with the conscious, waking contents of ones thoughts and the contents of the world around
However, the “Real” phase can be seen as a phase of crisis because at this point in a civilization or individuals maturation, childish imagination has been discarded as “silly” or not real at best, a debilitating burden at worst. Men are no longer at the mercy of nature
& their fate is inarguably tied to material factors - such as a budget and income - and the direct result of rational choice. The policies of ones gov’t seem much more decisive in the course of ones life here than does say the changing of the seasons or any contingency of nature
As a result, any religious belief or ritual takes on the form of mimicry no matter how ardently one believes, no matter how much “faith” one has, a man in the real phase knows that his boss is the one who keeps him fed and his landlord/the bank decides if he loses his roof
Therefore any religious stories morph from a foundational truth into a mere myth that no one believes any longer and even if they *think* they do they do not live *in* them because *their* world is without such magical or fantastic capabilities.
And in this phase one begins to see their art going one of two ways: either actual real life as “entertainment” or hyper-stimulating and overblown fantasy as over-compensation for the disenchantment of real life. Of course, this leads to what we know of as LARPing
We can consider the Aeneid and Don Quixote as the transition point from the Mirror phase into the real phase for their respective civilizations; the Romans LARPing as Greeks and the Quixote larping as a knight. In both cases the subject is trying to reconnect with [...]
an earlier, more naive time when the world was enchanted and the subject was fully integrated with a spiritual hierarchy in which their fate was not determined by rational, material decisions but by the Gods themselves or (in the case of Quixote), pure Will.
I don’t know why the thread cuts off here pleas see my home page to pick up its conclusion
