Have you ever found yourself wanting to explain something that’s so big and important you have no idea how to approach it? That’s where I am this week with introducing the idea of archetypes in fantasy. In my head I keep hearing Neil Gaiman’s statement
“These stories have power.”
Gaiman was talking about fairy tales, but the declaration holds for fantasy, too. I’m talking about the foundational stuff now; fantasy has branched off in many directions—urban punk, horror, space opera, alternative history, vampire romance, grimdark, sword and sorcery, etc. etc.—and not all the descendants drink from the Sacred Well of the Unconscious any longer. Most of them do, or at least use it to brew their tea, but not all. Which is why some stories “stick” and so many don’t.
I want to talk about the ones that drink deep from that well, those stories that drive the primal impulses we feel but don’t entirely understand, the stories that matter (as Samwise once said), the ones we return to as if for nourishment again and again, the ones that feed a need in us, a need so deeply seated that we have trouble articulating it even as it gnaws at us.
These stories have power. But why do they have power? Is there a secret decoder ring, a GPS that will take us straight to the heart of Elfland, from whence springs all things magical? No. There’s no Garmin to get us there, no secret code. We have guides who can get us close: Tolkien, LeGuin, Gaiman among them, writers who know how to harness the star-stuff of fantasy to forge a tale that doesn’t fade over time. But what is that star-stuff itself, the potent brews they work with? We need to know what that is first, before we can understand the hold that fantasy has on our imaginations.
This is where Jung comes in handy. Not that Jung holds all the secrets to unlocking the potential, the power and the mesmerizing nature of that starry brew, but he has a handful of keys.
A few necessary and sensible precautions are in order: 1) Not everything Jung wrote has held up. As psychology is an imprecise vocation and Jung is one of its founders, his work sometimes went in, shall we say, strange directions? Even so, he’s the only psychiatrist who was willing to jump headfirst and wholly into the unconscious, and his expeditions bore fruit. 2) Many of his examples and much of his rhetoric around primitive societies and “primitive” states of being are cringe-worthy. I won’t be using them, but if you read his work for yourself, be forewarned; he was a product of his time, and at least some of his work reads like fingernails on a chalkboard. 3) I am writing now as a reader and writer of fantasy. This sideline inquiry is not for everyone; if you’re not interested, feel free to skip. If, however, you wonder why certain stories leverage such power over your imagination, maybe my attempts will help you figure it out.
None of these precautions are anywhere near as important as this last one: Archetypes, and their relationships to both the collective unconscious and any given individual, are difficult things to grasp. They slide away when you look at them. Attempts to nail them down drain them of their power and their life, and reduce them to mere things. Archetypes are not things, any more than lightning is a flash of light or thunder a mere sound wave. Just as lightning and thunder are manifestations of incredibly powerful forces, so too are archetypes, and they are as resonant and elusive. So be warned. This is not the country of hard definitions and precise analysis. It’s more like groping in the dark.
Ready? Let’s start.
The Individual is the Only Reality (1, p. 45)
Carl G. Jung left an enormous body of work, much of it eloquent, wondrously thought-provoking and deeply humane. I’ve often thought that if you want to “fix” a psychological problem, you go to Freud; if you want to understand the human mind, go to Jung.
The man wrote a lot, and his interests ranged wide, and it’s not easy to figure out where to begin with him. He was particularly interested in the architecture of the unconscious, and the workings of the collective spiritus mundi, and he had definite opinions about the way the unconscious expresses itself: in language, in art, and especially in dreams. Much of his writing is focused on dream analysis.
Which is cool in its own right. But what he writes about dreams holds true for art, especially for fantasy, since both dreams and fantasy speak in image and metaphor. Archetypes power both dream and fantasy; as Ursula LeGuin once wrote, realistic fiction is to daydream as fantasy is to dream. Both dream and fantasy speak in the language of the night, the language of the primal, of the unconscious, of that well that lies at the base of what is human (2, p. 84).
A good place to start with Jung is at the end of his career, with a group of essays published posthumously as Man and His Symbols (1 — all links are to Wikipedia entries; there are pdf editions of all these works online, but I prefer to work with the printed books, so that’s what I’ll refer to). It’s as good an introduction to Jung as is available anywhere. The first essay in the collection, “Approaching the Unconscious,” was authored by Jung and is a compact 94-page primer to his theories of the unconscious and the importance of dream analysis. I’m going to open my examination of Jung and fantasy with this first essay, (in case you want to read ahead). We’ll start looking closely at this essay next week, and from this collection we’ll move to Psychology and Alchemy and Symbols of Transformation, briefly and in overview. Jung writes about dreams, but we’ll focus more on the relationship between archetype and fantasy literature. The two discussions run on parallel tracks, and that’s how we’ll approach them.
In every individual, Jung saw the universe, or at least all of humanity, represented. We are all individual islands in the same archipelago, or as Jung wrote, “The individual is the only reality.” His work, like the writer’s work, is centered in the human realm, deeply interested in what it means to be human, what it is to be whole, hopeful, simultaneously wide awake and dreaming.
Dream symbolism and fantasy go hand-in-hand. Two weeks ago Clio gave us a great example of the primal energy in fantasy in her discussion of The Castle of Otranto, especially in her examination of the work’s surrealism. What she calls surrealistic Jung would call archetypal: the subterranean imprisonment, the unnatural and cruel father, the hidden heir, the parallels between degenerate lordship and crumbling building—archetypal themes, all of them. It’s no wonder that Walpole was so influential despite the book’s cringeworthy sentimentality; his imagery—from the giant helmet to the living painting—is also the imagery of dream, the image of archetype.
Obviously not all fantasy draws so literally and crudely from dream. But even given several removes, the archetypal power remains. LeGuin’s books of Earthsea, for instance—densely written and powerful; the first, A Wizard of Earthsea is about growing up; The Tombs of Atuan is about sex, and The Farthest Shore is about death. The later novels, written at a remove of some twenty years, are about achieving wholeness and accepting mortality, with the focus not on death, but on a full life. The later novels are tender and beautifully drawn, but they don’t harness the immediacy and raw power of Ged’s acceptance of his shadow, or Tenar’s breaking out of the labyrinth, or Arren and Ged’s scaling of the flint mountains (3, p. 55). In each novel, the scope is epic; the struggle is individual, and is for the human soul.
These stories have power. Over the next few weeks, we will look at archetype and the way it leverages that power. We’ll go a bit afield and into strange places, but hey—it’ll be fun! No highway from Elfland to Poughkeepsie, we’re backpacking in to perilous country, with a bedroll and a pack of matches. What could possibly go wrong?
References
1. Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols, eds. Carl G. Jung and M.L. von Frantz. NY: Laurel, 1968, pp. 1-94.
2. Ursula LeGuin, “From Elfland to Poughkeepsie,” in The Language of the Night, ed. Susan Wood. NY: Putnam, 1979, pp. 83-96.
3. Ursula LeGuin, “Dreams Must Explain Themselves,” in The Language of the Night, ed. Susan Wood. NY: Putnam, 1979, pp. 47-56.