Martin Sheen in his shadow form, in Apocalypse Now.
We like to think we live in daylight, but half the world is always dark; and fantasy, like poetry, speaks the language of the night. — Ursula Le Guin (1).
For the next few weeks I want to unpack some of the things that fantasy does that no other literary form can accomplish. Part of fantasy’s appeal is sheer fun—the fun of invention and imagination; as a writer it’s the fun of coloring outside the lines, as a reader it’s the joy of having your imagination challenged and stretched.
But there’s more to fantasy than Every Boy’s Great Adventure—H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs turned to unexplored parts of Africa (and Mars) to set their unstoppable heroes in fantasy-like settings, because, I suspect, “Africa” was considered a great location for a testosterone-fueled adventure, while a place like Shannara would automatically be considered appropriate for little children (2). Make no mistake: She, Tarzan, John Carter, etc., are adventure stories, not literary masterpieces. Today we classify them with fantasies, but they are not masterpieces of fantasy, either. Nor are the vast majority of the popular fantasy series that you can name off the top of your head: Shannara, Wheel of Time, First Law, etc.--they’re popular because they’re fun but they’re not great literary works.
Why not? Because of the underpinnings. It’s the underpinnings I want to talk about. For the next few weeks, I’m going to lean heavily on a couple of sources: Ursula Le Guin’s The Language of the Night, and some of Carl Gustav Jung’s works, particularly Symbols of Transformation and Psychology and Alchemy.
Jung’s writings on the Self particularly inform, not only Le Guin, but a great many artists of both written and visual media. There’s a good reason for this—Jung makes the mythic comprehensible. Joseph Campbell leans heavily on him in developing his ideas of the Hero in literature, and The Hero of A Thousand Faces is a base text if you want to explore fantasy’s artistic potential.
If you want to really grok the reason Le Guin called Fantasy “the language of the night,” why she says that, as mainstream fiction corresponds most closely to daydream, fantasy corresponds to dream, dream in all its uncanny reality, its archetypes, its hard truths (and she’s absolutely correct), follow along.
That’s where we’re heading. But we start with the Self.
The Self and the Unconscious
Freud defined the human mind as tripartate: Id, Ego and Superego (and yes, I’m treating this way too superficially—but then, I am not a psychologist and would just as likely muck it up if I go much farther). I do know enough about psychology to know that, to Jung, Freud’s architecture of the human mind didn’t suffice, so he developed his own. And here, drastically oversimplified, is my take on Jung and the Self:
Consider the Self—conscious and unconscious, in all its overwhelming power; the Self, the most potent force in humanity. The concept of the Self, that part of the mind that identifies itself as unique (the Ego, as Freud would have it), is only a part of the true Self. All personal perceptions, thoughts, prejudices, preferences—that’s all part of the Concept of Self, that which you know is you.
Although there are points where they correspond, the Self and the Concept of Self are not the same. The true Self contains much more than the conscious Self recognizes (and yes, I totally realize that this explanation is 1. mushy and 2. superficial, but hey, ya dance with the consciousness that brung ya). In fact, the Self is not strictly a private or personal entity, but is connected to everyone through that unconscious part of the Self, that part we share with everyone, the Collective Unconscious, or Spiritus Mundi. It’s the part of the self that wakens in dreams, that speaks in patterns, in shared images, in commonalities that repeat and reverberate across time, distance, culture; it’s the part of the self that knows and celebrates its belonging to the universe, that thing that lets us recognize our selves in other people, perhaps in other animals, perhaps in the world at large.
Is it any wonder that 9 out of 10 artists surveyed prefer Jung as their psychologist of choice?
As Le Guin explains (and I’m using her explanation because it’s both elegant and simple, and if I were to attempt it, we’d be here for months), every person is fundamentally the same all the way to the unconscious. The structures of our minds are all the same.
The ego, the little private individual consciousness, knows this, and it knows that if it’s not to be trapped in the hopeless silence of autism it must identify with something outside itself, beyond itself, larger than itself. If it’s weak, or if it’s offered nothing better, what it does is identify with the “collective consciousness”...cults, creeds, fads, fashions, status-seeking, conventions, received beliefs, advertising, popcult, all the isms...that lack real communion or real sharing. The ego, accepting these empty forms, becomes a member of the “lonely crowd.” To avoid this, to attain real community, it must turn inward, away from the crowd, to the source: it must identify with its own deeper regions, the great unexplored regions of the self...and it is in them, where we all meet, that [Jung] sees the source of true community; of felt religion; of art, grace, spontaneity, and love. (1, p. 63)
See? Elegant and simple. To Le Guin, and to Jung, and to other artists over the millenia, to achieve real, deep communion with the world, to find our way to a greater sense of the Whole—everything the world is, everything the world can be—we have to go in, go down, down into the night, into the dark, into the self. Like Dante. The way to the light is through the dark. The way Up is In.
What has this got to do with Fantasy? Well, Fantasy speaks the Language of the Night. Fantasy is uniquely qualified to connect the Concept of Self to the Self through the unconscious. That is its artistic power, its appeal. Simple, and yet, not at all simple. You tap the unconscious and the well you draw from is humanity.
And that is, simply, why Fantasy is powerful. It leads us to places that daylight fiction doesn’t venture, except rarely. The tools of its craft are the keys to the unconscious, and its aim is to educate, to enhance, to deepen our understanding of humanity, of the world, of ourselves.
Yeah. There’s room in the form for the Boy’s Own Adventure, but that’s not all that fantasy does—swords and sorceries are metaphors for a different drama, played out on a different field, one where the stakes are nothing less than the weight and measure of the human soul.
Me and My Shadow
If you’re familiar with the concept of the animus, you can skip these next few paragraphs.
Everyone else gone now? Okay, here we go:
Our unconscious speaks to us in dreams. Yes, sometimes dreams process the unresolved business of the day, but sometimes they speak deeper truths, and are not random occurrences. Their structures are archetypal; there are patterns in dreams that are universal. We can go off into a deep rabbit hole about dreams and their interpretations, and if you’re interested in that, I’d recommend Jung’s Memories, Dreams and Reflections as a starting point. What I want to note here is 1) dreams speak from the unconscious, and they speak powerfully and 2) there is a presence, a figure, in dream who might change form but whose purpose remains constant—the anima/animus.
Again, speaking way too broadly, the animus is the subconscious part of the mind. For women, this dream counterpart to the conscious mind most often manifests as male, an animus; for men, usually the figure is female, an anima. This figure is intimidating, can be threatening, alluring, dangerous, or kindly (based on the situation). The animus often serves as a guide or companion; its presence, despite its dangerous aspect, is beneficent. The animus serves a host of other psychological functions, and I’m not interested in them right now. For the purposes of literature, it’s important to understand the animus as guide, and shadow.
The Shadow Knows
The shadow—threatening, dangerous, encompassing all those powers we deny, is also absolutely necessary for a whole life. Le Guin writes elsewhere, in “The Child and the Shadow,”
The shadow is the other side of our psyche, the dark brother of the conscious mind. It is Cain, Caliban, Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde. It is Vergil who guided Dante through hell, Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu, Frodo’s enemy Gollum. It is the Doppelganger. It is Mowgli’s Gray Brother; the werewolf; the wolf, the bear, the tiger of a thousand folktales; it is the serpent, Lucifer. The shadow stands on the threshold between the conscious and unconscious mind, and we meet it in our dreams, as sister, brother, friend, beast, monster, enemy, guide. It is all we don’t want to, can’t admit into our conscious self, all the qualities and tendencies within us which have been repressed, denied, or not used. (1, pp. 63-64)
You can see where this works in Fantasy.
In Fantasy we meet our shadows, and in Fantasy our shadows are at home. We tend to think of dark as evil, but this is not only too simple, it’s also wrong. Light cannot exist without darkness; without evil, good is meaningless. Bulgakov says this in The Master and Margarita when Matthew Levi is sent by Yeshua to Woland to seek dispensation for the Master and his beloved Margarita. Woland is not a figure of evil but rather a force of justice; he doesn’t damn the hapless citizens of Moscow but asks them to choose and gives them what they deserve. Yeshua asks Woland to give the Master peace. Matthew Levi, whom Yeshua says usually misunderstands everything, greets Woland as “spirit of evil and sovereign of shadows,” to which Woland answers,
You uttered your words as if you don’t acknowledge shadows, or evil either. Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people. Here is the shadow of my sword. Trees and living beings also have shadows. Do you want to skin the whole earth, tearing all the trees and living things off it, because of your fantasy of enjoying bare light? (3)
Woland, wiser than Matthew Levi, is not at war with light; in concert with Yeshua, he secures a future for Margarita and her Master. Matthew Levi might be blessed, but it is his shortcoming is that he denies the darkness; he can see neither darkness nor shadow and so will remain a disciple, or a slave, as Woland calls him.
The Master and Margarita is too complex a work to be reduced to simple formula; the same is true of most fantasies. What we are looking at are elements of the whole, important elements, elements that speak to the work’s profundity, and without which the work would lack resonance. I contend that it’s these elements that are missing in “lightweight” fantasies.
Le Guin’s hero Ged says, “For a word to be spoken...there must be silence. Before, and after.” (4) It’s not the darkness that’s important, it’s the balance of light and dark—each defines the other, each depends on the other, each requires the other. The aim of life is to achieve balance, an integration of darkness and light, good and evil, judgment and inspiration, destruction and creation—it’s all held in tension. The strength of Fantasy is that the language of the archetype is its native tongue; it can make metaphor literal. The quest for wholeness is the quest of every human life—life is a journey, and it’s no accident that so many successful fantasies are organized around quests (which are, after all, the metaphor of character development made literal).
In A Wizard of Earthsea, apprentice wizard Ged attempts necromancy on a dare. It’s a misuse of power, a thing undertaken for the wrong reason. Unsurprisingly, the spell goes awry and some dark thing is released. This thing marks Ged and pursues him relentlessly, pursues him until he turns and seeks it out. Then it flees him as he hunts this thing that he can’t name, this thing he fears, this shadow. His quest takes him across the sea until, almost at the end of things, he meets it:
Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so much white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow’s name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: “Ged.” And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one. (4, pp. 178-179)
In accepting and incorporating his dark self, Ged is made whole, and empowered to go on to live his life as a whole man, unhaunted, unhunted, scarred by his experience, but healed.
The metaphorical made literal. Fantasy can do this. In Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, the protagonist Shadow’s (and, yes, the name is appropriate in all its metaphorical connotations) quest is one of which at first he’s barely aware. Wednesday uses him as a shield, acts as a guide. But in serving as Wednesday’s bodyguard, his doppleganger, Shadow’s journey takes on its own momentum, surpasses Wednesday’s and puts Wednesday’s quest in the shadows. Layers and layers of connotations, all of them rising from myth and archetype, rising from the unconscious—to read the book is to watch them at play.
Gaiman makes liberal use of folktale motives in his work—the three “kindly” ladies who show up again and again, the animal guides in Neverwhere, Stardust and especially American Gods where the guides are drawn from the First Nations and given a Gaiman-twist. Usually the animal guide (animus in another form) offers the hero help but warns that, when the time comes, the hero must kill the guide, metaphorically killing his own bestial nature in order to ascend. In American Gods the animals guides are the bison whose wisdom guides Shadow, and the Thunderbird, whom Shadow pursues and whose flight, it is said, is like riding lightning. Shadow riding lightning, the brightest of lights—yes, there are layers and layers of meaning here.
Not all great fantasies use the shadow motif, but you’d be surprised how many do; you just have to look for it. Le Guin reads Lord of the Rings as as a psychological text, to surprising effect. Yes, there are the stock good guys and bad, but there’s more:
When you look at the story as a psychic journey, you see something quite different [from the conventional standards of virtue and vice]. You see then a group of bright figures, each one with its black shadow. Against the Elves, the Orcs. Against Aragorn, the Black Rider. Against Gandalf, Saruman. And above all, against Frodo, Gollum. Against him—and with him.
It is truly complex, because both the figures are already doubled. Sam is, in part, Frodo’s shadow, his inferior part. Gollum is two people too….Sam understands Gollum very well, though he won’t admit it and won’t accept Gollum as Frodo does, letting Gollum be their guide, trusting him. Frodo and Gollum are not only both hobbits; they are the same person—and Frodo knows it. … And it is Frodo the good who fails, who at the last moment claims the Ring of Power for himself; and it is Gollum the evil who achieves the quest, destroying the Ring, and himself with it. The Ring, the archetype of the Integrative Function, the creative-destructive, returns to the volcano, the eternal source of creation and destruction, the primal fire. (1, p. 68)
Frodo can’t progress without his shadow Gollum; Gollum, his second self, who is annihilated in returning the ring to the fire (and is Das Rheingold playing in the back of anyone else’s mind? That is deliberate, as Tolkien borrowed heavily from Germanic myth in constructing Middle Earth.)
The sacrifice of self, the ouroboros of creation and destruction, the tension between great good and profound evil in the Self—these are all the purview of fantasy, and subjects for future weeks. The language of the day isn’t adequate to encompass it, unless we’re in the hands of our greatest novelists at the height of their powers— a Melville, a Conrad or a Dostoyevsky—but it’s natural fit for Gaiman and Tolkien and Le Guin, and any number of fantasists (right now, Berg and Rothfuss come to mind, but they too will have to wait). The inner journey, the quest of the spirit toward wholeness, its understanding of good and evil not as diametrical opposites but an entwined whole, each needing the other to exist.
The shadow is our guide, our counterpart, our animus, our necessary Other. We meet him (or her) in dreams, and he dwells in fantasy. Indeed, Fantasy is uniquely equipped to speak on multiple levels. That is its strength, its source of fascination—that it can do things other kinds of writing can’t do. Unsurprisingly, Fantasy developed as a genre alongside the development of psychology, especially Jungian psychology. To ignore the archetypal symbolism at work in fantasy is to dwell in the land of Every Boy’s Great Adventure—a nice place to visit, a Neverland without a Wendy. But the deeper parts of the forest are a lot more interesting.
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