Jung as a Writer

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Jung and Literature ('Poetry' CW15, 'Psychology and Literature' CW15, 'Ulysses' CW15) If it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of it as a collective human being... having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, practically immortal. (Jung, 1931/1960, CW8: para. 673) The collective unconscious, moreover, seems to be not a person, but something like an unceasing stream or perhaps an ocean of images and figures which drift into consciousness in our dreams or in abnormal states of mind. (ibid.: para. 674) Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly a work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking. (Jung, 1922/1966, CW15: para. 130) INTRODUCTION Introducing this book In this book I aim to explore the works of C.G. Jung by looking at how he wrote them. Why devote such attention to Jung's writing style? Of course every writer who has something to say will find it affected by his or her means of saying it. So given Jung's profound impact on psychology, the history of ideas and culture, it is important to consider the kinds of expression that convey his unique perspective. However, it is the 1 contention of this book that there is something special, and hitherto neglected, in the need to examine Jung's prose. For Jung believed and wrote as though he believed that the thinking and discriminating mind - conventionally used to produce non-fictional argument - was situated within a sea of unconscious creativity. To him this inner world of unfathomable and inexhaustible creativity is one of the most important aspects of the human mind. So it is not enough just to write about it in a rational, logical manner. Jung thought that psychology writing should aspire to the greatest authenticity by including unconscious psychic creativity within writing, not limit it to outside, to what psychology is about. Truly, Jung's works aim for a fidelity to psyche-logos, words that respond to the whole of the mind and not just its well-mapped territories. My metaphor of the mind as a landscape, and psychology as a form of mapping the unknown, is indicative of the kinds of thinking this book will look at. For Jung proves to be persistently fascinated with the psyche as a form of space and time. First of all, however, I will introduce some of the basic approaches I will be using and offer those readers new to Jung a guide to the most significant Jungian ideas. Jung has often been criticised for his writing style. At times given to what appears as self-indulgent digressions, many of his essays seem to constitute an excursion around his topic rather than the crisp, tightly focused abstract prose modern culture has been conditioned to call 'science'. Indeed, the struggle to define 'scientific writing' when addressed to the vagaries of the human psyche is the subject of much of Jung's unique style. Roderick Main has comprehensively analysed Jung's attitude to science, 2 especially in relation to religion (Main, 2000, 2004). It will be one of the tasks of this book to look at how 'science' is used as problematic textual terrain; how it becomes a literary domain constructed and, often, de-constructed in the works. Jung as a Writer uses methodologies devised in the discipline of literary studies in order to explore Jung's writing. My purpose is to show that literary techniques can provide a valuable perspective on Jung because the notion of creativity was fundamental to his conception of the psyche. In writing, Jung is not just describing the creativity of the psyche, his words also enact and perform it. It is possible that here we have a clue to Jung's constant revision to his texts. For perhaps, for Jung, a piece of writing was only truly valid if it retained a trace of the spontaneity that he believed to be integral to psychic functioning. Take, for example, the first two quotations at the head of this chapter. Situated close together in an essay that purports to be introductory, they would appear to be going in different directions. If I wished to summarise them, I could say: on the one hand, the collective unconscious is like a mythical ageless being; on the other hand, it is not like a being, it is like an ocean, a flow of images. Readers new to Jung could be forgiven for finding such - essentially literary playing with metaphors - unhelpful. Why tell stories of the collective unconscious instead of offering a neat definition? What is the collective unconscious? What is it really like? Fortunately for Jung's durability in the psychological community, he did provide 'proper' definitions and offer firm 'concepts'. Shortly I am going to make use of this kind of writing and give an outline of the key ideas for those unfamiliar with his work. 3 However, the juxtaposition of these two quotations illustrates something very important: Jung put the expressive, creative nature of the psyche first. The ability of anyone, including himself, to produce a comprehensive science of the psyche, even to describe psychic processes accurately in words - comes second to the innate property of the human mind to be mysterious. Ultimately, the psyche confounds the essentially cultural divisions of science and art, will reveal them to be culture. The unconscious is like a mythical being; no, the unconscious is like an ocean of flowing images. It is an attempt to evoke in writing what cannot be entirely grasped: the fleeting momentary presence of something that forever mutates and reaches beyond the ego's inadequate understanding. Such a form of writing cannot help being, in part, literary. This is not to allege that Jung was, or considered himself to be, the author of fiction. Rather, his psychology needs to be understood in terms of its aesthetic qualities. And these qualities, in the Jungian approach, do not detract from its identity as 'psychology'; they are basic to it. Just a quick note about the structure of this book. The following chapters concentrate on large topics such as 'gender', 'myth', 'nature', 'culture' and 'argument' by focusing on major Jungian works. These chapters often fall into two parts because I am doing two things. First of all I will be drawing out the implications of Jung's way of writing on a subject; constructing an argument about what is presented. Secondly, I will examine the organization of Jung's text directly, the how it is written. Of course it is integral to my project that there can be no real separation between content and form. Therefore the chapters constitute an attempt to realize a whole, by a discussion of parts that belong together in an aesthetic entity. 4 So while the overall scope of the book is to understand the extent and consequences of the combination of aesthetic and scientific writing, individual chapters will pursue discrete but related themes. After introducing Jung's core ideas, the rest of Chapter 1 will examine his role as a literary critic. Chapter 2 takes 'myth' as its subject since it is a form of representation that Jung wanted at the heart of his psychology. Naturally, myth is a key expression of the tension in Jung between narrative and conceptual expression. Therefore Chapter 3 looks at this dichotomy as one between dialectical or oppositional thinking, and story-telling, in the complex area of gender. Desire and control come together in the fascination with the feminine as spectral. As a result of this study, Chapter 4's perspective on Jung's form of 'argument' is able to explore his use of rhetorical versus logical methods. This chapter also uncovers the key role played by textual criticism or hermeneutics, in the building of the psychology. So later, Chapter 5 on 'nature' develops Jung's textual sense with the help of theories of ecocriticism (devoted to re-thinking the relation of 'man and nature). Now able to show Jung as a dialogical thinker and author, I explore how Jung's writing reaches out to the ecosystem in ways that could excite (post)modernity. Chapter 6 turns to history and the writing of the self as the discourses of the imagination. Jung as a Writer develops by analyzing Jung's imagination as progressively more plural and spatial, as the tension between literature and science drives him into experimental and fantasy modes. Always he seeks to enlarge the psychic home of modernity, so in Chapter 7, I look at his understanding of culture and ethics in the context of science, gender and religion. Ultimately, Jung's struggle with 5 writing is with a modernity historically framed by exclusion. In Chapter 7, the critique of modern culture is polarized between issues of visibility and intelligibility. The book ends with a reversal, in that the art of Jung's writing provides a Jungian approach to art. The Epilogue gives a new Jungian criticism of Shakespeare's Hamlet in order to demonstrate Jung's writing as a reading of the psyche as an organ of meaning in space and time. Jung for Literary Studies? Literary studies or the discipline of 'English' has neglected Jung to its own detriment. On the one hand, a form of Jungian literary criticism exists that draws upon the conceptual Jung; the one that offers definitions abstracted from the writings and applied to fictional texts. Such criticism often ignores the aesthetic quality of Jung's own prose. On the other hand, the explosion of literary theory in the latter part of the twentieth century has drawn almost exclusively upon Freudian and Lacanian psychic principles. In an era of philosophical and ethical approaches to literature, it seems perverse to exclude Jung, as the 'other'. Jungian literary criticism needs to be brought into modern literary theory and literary theory needs to look at what and how Jung actually wrote. Not least because Jung's specific essays on literature reveal him to be deeply concerned with literature as cultural production, as the third quotation at the start of the chapter demonstrates. The rest of Chapter 1 will provide a guide to the key concepts, an analysis of the 6 essays on literature, and then will look at Jung's surprising and fantastic act of cultural criticism of Ulysses by James Joyce (Joyce, 1922). Readers familiar with Jung might like to skip the next section and more onto the works on literature and art. Introducing Jung: A Guide to Key Concepts In addition to this brief introduction to Jung, I would recommend the novice to consult Andrew Samuels's ground breaking Jung and the Post-Jungians (Samuels, 1985), and A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis (Samuels, Shorter, Plaut, 1986). To begin with the founding principle of Jung's psychology is to realize that the unconscious is superior to the capacity of the ego to comprehend it. The unconscious is characteristically spontaneous and creative. It often acts independently of cognitive structures brought to bear by the ego and it is 'collective' because it contains structuring principles inherited collectively by mankind. These elements Jung came to call 'archetypes'. A common misconception is that archetypes are inherited images, inherited content. They are not. Archetypes are inherited principles for certain kinds of generic meanings. Those meanings actually generated, or images produced in dreams, will depend to a great extent on the culture and personal history of the dreamer. In addition to the superior spontaneity of the unconscious, Jung believed that the psyche was developing forwards towards some goal; it is teleological. The reason that the collective unconscious is so playfully active is that it is leading the more limited ego - that part of myself that I know and can control - into greater forms of 7 consciousness possible through relationship with the unconscious. The notion of a teleological goal-oriented psyche is a fundamental difference between the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jung. Freud believed that the unconscious was dominated by the repression of infantile sexual fantasy. Jung largely accepted Freud's pioneering concept of the Oedipus complex in which the child structures its ego-unconscious relationship through repressing forbidden incestuous desires. However he regarded the unconscious so produced - looking backwards into the archaic vestiges of infancy - as a less significant 'personal unconscious'. It is the task of adult subjectivity to realize ever more of the collective inheritance of archetypes that drive the psyche forwards. The name Jung gave to the lifelong, complex relationship between ego and archetypal energies is 'individuation'. A person individuates, becomes more individual and less conventional, because archetypes compensate for the biases of the ego, whether they be cultural or personal obsessions. The collective unconscious of archetypes is devoted to opposing and compensating rigid opinions, tendencies and modes of functioning in the ego. Therefore the psyche is a dynamic, self-regulating mechanism. By drawing upon its own 'other', it aims to heal itself of one-sidedness. Jung held that ideally the ego's role is to become a satellite of the most enigmatic and numinous archetype, which he called the 'self'. Therefore it is very important to understand that the word 'self' has a totally different emphasis in Jungian language than in everyday use. The self is one's identity as mystery. It is a state of being transcendent of, but not disconnected from, cultural forms. The second and sixth 8 chapters of this book deal with some of Jung's radical and experimental attempts to write about the self. The ego's goal is connection with the self yet other archetypal factors also play a powerful a role in the individuating psyche. For compensation of the ego's personality may begin with opposition. Jung gave the generic name of the 'shadow' to those psychic images of the opposite qualities that the ego rejects as its conscious identity. Hence the shadow's capacity to generate images of horrifying and morally reprehensible modes of behaviour with seemingly annihilating potency. The shadow is that which the ego has no wish to be; the darkness in the soul it has no wish to live out. It is therefore that which the ego must understand as its own potential, its own 'other' side. Too often the inner psychic shadow is projected 'outside' onto another person, race, culture or history. Only by recognising the shadow as a figure within the psyche, is the danger of demonising the other avoidable. A less potentially catastrophic form of psychic compensation is that of gender. On the one hand, Jung was essentialist on gender in believing that sexual identity bestows an unproblematic gender identity. Such a position leads him to state sporadically that women have less rational characteristics than men (see Chapter 3). On the other hand, the starkness of this position is problematised by the role of the founding principle of the creative psyche. For by producing radically different psychic gender images, individuation constantly undermines conscious gender identity. Archetypes are androgynous. They are as capable of manifesting feminine as masculine forms. The logic of individuation through compensation entails that men need to be in dialogue with feminine images in their psyche, women with masculine images. Jung called the 9 feminine image within the psyche of a man, the 'anima; the corresponding male figure in the psyche of a woman, the 'animus'. It is important to remember that the unconscious is the leading partner in individuation. Women and men are required to come to terms with their inner bisexuality and to respect the other, both within and without, in the form of the other gender. In Jung: A Feminist Revision I extensively analysed Jung's radical and naive treatment of gender (Rowland, 2002). Here it forms the subject of Chapter 3. Gender provides one of the greatest points of tension within Jung's writings as it is often becomes the structuring pivot between the desire to pin down the psyche in rational statements, and the need to acknowledge the limitations inherent in that very desire. Indeed it is this tension between the desire to know something definitely and completely, and the requirement to keep the creativity of the psyche as part of the act of cognition that underpins all of Jung's writing. It is time to see what he made of 'creative writing' unconstrained by the label 'psychology'; his treatment of literature and art. 'ON THE RELATION OF ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY TO POETRY' (JUNG, 1922/1966, CW15) This dynamic essay critically focuses upon the whole notion of literature in relation to culture and intellectual disciplines. Too little attention has been paid to Jung's serious investigation of his own context in looking at something wholly outside his professional domain. What is at stake when using the lens of psychology to investigate avowedly aesthetic writing? 10 'On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry' falls into four movements in which four stages of argument roughly correspond to the progression of the text. There is a linear spine to both the essays on literature discussed here, despite a tendency to a circling recapitulation of themes, which we will discover to be even more pronounced in the larger works. The four movements are: firstly, the essay's exploration of disciplinary frameworks; secondly, the autonomy of art vis a vis the artist, together with the iconography of artistic symbols and signs; thirdly, Jung offers a surprisingly trenchant critique of 'scientific language', and fourthly, that the role of some art is to compensate the prevailing culture. Literature can either veer towards being an expression of the ideals of its epoch, or, conversely, it may subvert its norms. In a Disciplinary Frame Art by its very nature is not science, and science by its very nature is not art... (Jung, 1922/1966, CW15: para. 99) Jung begins by writing explicitly as a scientist and opening 'On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry' by insisting upon disciplinary contexts. To assume straightforwardly that a psychology can explain all art or even religion would constitute a 'violation' of their 'essential nature' (ibid.: para. 98). Art and religion can never become subdivisions of psychology. Any attempt on the part of psychology to expand its framework to encompass such territories betrays an underlying assumption: that there is some fundamental 'unifying principle' that would justify such disciplinary imperialism (ibid.: para. 99). One discipline may subsume another only if there is 11 some underlying truth that unites them. Crucially, Jung finds no grounds for such a unifying principle from cultural history. 'Primitives', he says grandly, do mingle psychology, art and religion, but in an 'undifferentiated chaos' (ibid.: para. 99). I shall be looking at the endemic colonialism of this notion of 'primitives' in the following chapter. Here it is important to stress that Jung resists condensing art, psychology and religion into one drive or principle in cultural history, and in the individual's development from childhood. The plurality of differentiated states pertaining to these separable entities should not be falsely homogenised. For the consequences of such a reduction to 'oneness' would be to project a favourite mechanism of the 'scientific attitude', that of causality, where it has no business. Jung argues that it is illegitimate to condense the chaotic, undifferentiated infant psyche into one structural psychological principle that would then determine or 'cause' artistic and religious expression. Here, Jung's prime candidate for the error of making infantile psychology subsume all cultural production makes an appearance: Sigmund Freud. To Freud, insists Jung, art and literature are reducible to infantile neuroses. Through this 'corrosive' method, the work of art is reduced to the all too familiar dynamics of sexual repression and Oedipal agonies. So from the imposition of a unifying principle, psychology itself becomes an aggrandising monster that presumes to a superior explanatory power over art. Jung is quick to elaborate on the weaknesses of what he has set up as the Freudian method. Since all poets share the common human 12 predicament of a father and mother complex, the compulsion to make all art submit to Oedipal explanations risks saying the same thing over and over again. It turns art into a neurotic search for symptoms. Signs, Symbols and Detaching Art from the Artist Jung is undoubtedly unfair to Freud, given the other's capacity for a nuanced response to literature. Yet, the argument about causality and Jung's desire to resist it is important for art criticism. In particular, Jung alleges that Freud treats artistic expression as a series of signs standing for symptoms. As he goes onto explain, the work of art as sign points to what is already known or knowable (usually personal or Oedipal anxieties). To counter such a reductive reading practice, Jung offers the notion of the 'symbol' in which the work or image is an emblem of the unknown or unknowable. Such art principally speaks a language foreign to the ego of its author; its significance surpasses traces of the formation of the ego. Such art is autonomous of the author because it is rooted in the collective unconscious, not reliant upon the author's personal life, but rather his impersonal one. For symbolic art, the author is not a guide to the work. To illustrate the idea of the work of art possessing symbolic independence from its author, Jung describes it as a plant that uses the human scribe merely as a 'nutrient medium' (ibid.: para. 108). This portrayal of the artist as a kind of 'zombie' suggests all sorts of science fiction possibilities. It is reinforced by his repeated use of 'alien' and 'alien will' to indicate that the hapless artist 'may be taken captive by his work' (ibid.: paras. 108-114). 13 One of the interesting aspects of this language of mutation is the way that 'nature' and 'plant' as words for art rooted in the collective unconscious, become re-framed as alien. For such works the reader is unable to interpret the work in the sense of comprehending it fully, however many times it is read and studied. Reading a symbolic work is to experience - in a phrase redolent of a territorial mapping of the mind - 'bridges thrown out towards an unseen shore' (ibid.: para. 116). However, despite this conjuring of 'alien' symbolic art, Jung concedes that many works do correspond to what is known, conscious and intended by the author. The later essay, 'Psychology and Literature' will develop and name this division into intentional and symbolic works as 'psychological' and 'visionary' (Jung, 1930/1950/1966, CW15: para. 139). It is worth mentioning here that Jung is fully aware of the problems of positing absolute categories. He notes that the intentional poet is capable of unleashing the alien will, just as a symbolic author may lapse into daylight conventions. More suggestively still, a culture may misread a work. It may fail to experience its true symbolic value until a later evolution of consciousness enlarges public understanding. The Problem of Scientific Language When speculating about art and meaning, Jung regards himself to be in the sphere of art. Now he turns to address the issue of writing about art from the perspective of psychology as a problem. Psychology and science require cognitive analysis. This kind of writing is itself a construction made from splitting off rationality from irrationality. Rational language is the voice of an ego that rejects the functioning of 14 the unconscious. Significantly, Jung's description of rational language as the proper mode of science problematises the division from the unconscious, but does not directly challenge it. Science requires that irrational unconscious experience be broken down and fashioned into concepts. We have to break down life and events, which are self-contained processes, into meanings, images, concepts, well knowing that in doing so we are getting further away from the living mystery. As long as we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious to immediate experience than cognition. But for the purposes of cognitive understanding we must detach ourselves from the creative process and look at it from the outside... In this way we meet the demands of science. (Jung, 1922/1966, CW15: para. 121) So science 'frames' meaning in more than one respect. For science is a framework that produces scientific meaning; it does not merely transmit it from pre-existing reality. Science is a mode of thinking and writing that transforms psychic products. It is the making of rational meaning by discarding or re-working the irrational aspects of the mind. The activity of being scientific, in applying psychological concepts to unruly psychic texts, constitutes its own knowledge out of material that to some extent will forever escape such 'rational' working. Jung is talking about critical distance, integral to both science and literary criticism, as a loss of authenticity. There is a gap between the experience of literature as an 15 intervention in subjectivity and the ability to rationally 'frame' it. After incorporating such a profound challenge to his own practice, and by extension to that of literary criticism, Jung makes a circular movement back to refine the categories that he put in place earlier. It is to risk the sin of simplistic causality to identify literary characteristics - in an artist and/or his art - with a psychological complex. However, art manifesting symptoms rather than symbols, can be relegated to Freud's harshly described 'purgative methods' (ibid.: para. 125). Even such a concession is not really a rapprochement with Freud even though it is limited to symptom-led works considered of secondary interest. For Freudian criticism is now also transplanted to the framing discourse of science, about which Jung has just expressed reservations. The circling movement of the essay, back to the 'unsatisfactory' nature of Freudian psychoanalysis, has the clever effect of both exposing the limitations of the assumption of a unifying principle that subsumes art into psychology, while later revealing the problems of not possessing such an argument in the inauthenticity of critical distance. Freud's ideas are inadequate, on the one hand, because they sink what is special about art into the common Oedipal story. On the other hand, their 'scientific' credentials for examining art are shaken by the argument that psychology creates itself out of psychic experience in a way that inevitably falsifies some of the psyche's native 'wildness'. A unifying principle, would, in fact, support psychology as exposing the 'true' interior forces within art. Freud cannot win: he obscures the art by his over-mastering theory because his unifying principle sinks the unique qualities of the artifact. Yet without it, 16 any attempt to speak of art in the language of science would be merely a rational screen unable to detect art's irrational properties. Doubly chastened, the Oedipal pathologising of art resurfaces under two modes of erasure. Another and better way of dealing with the problem of 'critical distance' is provided by Jung's notion of the 'collective' as pertinent to symbolic art. Without a principle of the 'collective' nature of symbols (which is Jung's way of asserting the social nature of human beings as fundamental), the rational apparatus of science could have no dialogue with the creative psyche. So it is unsurprising that the rest of the essay shows Jung interested in the relation of literature and culture as a mainstay of his scientific 'frame'. Literature is Cultural To Jung all art is profoundly cultural. Intentional art, employing signs rather than symbols, is expressive of the cultural consciousness, of the surface pre-occupations of the age. Symbolic art is compensatory: what is ignored or repressed in a culture is shaped by archetypal energies into something strange yet mysteriously necessary to the culture as much as to the individual. It is the archetypal symbol that animates the most powerful national allegories: the passion for 'mother' country or 'fatherland'. In educating the spirit of the age, art is socially transformative. Art is a means by which the collective unconscious in-forms collective society. Jung even brings to mind the way cultures operate by exclusion. In a resonant social metaphor he describes the symbolic artist as bringing to consciousness material consigned to 'the back streets' (ibid.: para. 131). 17 Finally, symbolic art has a cultural function more dynamically therapeutic than merely bringing to consciousness what has been excluded or missed out. Such art represents the healing self-regulation of the psyche amplified into the cultural dimension. Just as the collective unconscious provides a teleological drive for the individual psyche, so symbolic art structurally transforms collective culture in ways that amount to an internal self-regulating mechanism. Jung is quite explicit about this. Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual's conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs. (ibid.: para. 131) Jung is here an early contributor to cultural studies. Suggestively, the essay ends with a twist. In a final flourish Jung calls for his audience to devise their own literary examples that would serve as flesh and blood to 'my abstract intellectual frame' (ibid.: para. 132). There would appear to be a lingering anxiety about disciplinary frameworks with their fatal ability to reduce mysterious psychic phenomena to inauthenticity. In Jung's language of the alien will battening upon the hapless artist as a nutrient medium there is more than a hint of the uncanny. Jung's own art in this essay exposes the way Enlightenment rationality ('my abstract intellectual frame') emerges out of that psychic hinterland, and then fails to contain it. 'PSYCHOLOGY AND LITERATURE' (JUNG, 1930/1950/1966, CW15) In 'Psychology and Literature' Jung returns to the preoccupations of 'On Analytical Psychology in Relation to Poetry' with a heightened sense of the personal, philosophical and epoch-making role of art. In four movements again, Jung takes a 18 Romantic sensibility into anxieties about modernity and popular culture. Yet his language also betrays a fear of the Romantic possibilities of art, as potential harbingers of chaos. First of all, he places his collective unconscious in pursuit of Romantic notions of literature aspiring to realize what can be thought of, yet not adequately represented. In other words, Jung is more consciously interested in art of the sublime. Secondly, the argument about disciplinary frameworks is imaginatively re-cast in spatial and even territorial terms. The essay is framed as Jung's 'quest' beyond the bounds of 'science' to the door, the veil, the painted curtain blowing eerily over the abyss. Thirdly, what was a far-reaching notion of the cultural function of art has intensified into Jung's own myth of the psychic perils of modernity. Science and reason are modern constructs designed to conceal more irrationally infused modes of consciousness from cultural recognition. Fourth and lastly, Jung has intimations about popular culture that are more evident to an age of mass media technology than to his own. To what extent does the hypnotic and addictive quality of popular art trouble the seemingly neat categories of 'psychological' and 'visionary'? Jung in the Romantic Sublime and Beautiful In this essay Jung officially divides literature into the 'psychological' mode of the known, collective consciousness and the 'visionary' category of works drawing more upon the collective unconscious (ibid.: para. 139). Jung's awed fascination for the 'greater' of his two categories, the visionary hints at an affiliation with Romantic theories of art. Approximating to the Romantic philosopher Edmund Burke's description of art as either 'beautiful' or 'sublime', the psychological and the visionary provide something of a Romantic psychology (Burke, 1757). Like the 'beautiful', 'psychological' literature satisfies conventional aesthetic categories. Indeed its label 19 derives from the fact that psychological art is its own psychologist: it inhabits the consciousness of author, reader and culture very comfortably. Psychological art may be subtle, but its artifice is fully present to its audience. There is almost something suspicious about a class of literature that troubles no disciplinary framework, being transparent to both the aesthetician and the psychologist. Far more deeply disturbing is 'visionary' art that challenges structures of all kinds from the traditional disciplines to the very notion of 'human'. Sublime... it arises from timeless depths; glamorous, daemonic, and grotesque, it bursts asunder our human standards of values and aesthetic form... (ibid.: para. 141) 'Abstract frameworks' quail before this red-blooded language. A Quest Through Disciplinary Fields At this point it is important to look closer at the essay's treatment of disciplinary categories. In an introduction published posthumously, Jung begins the essay by granting psychology itself some of the explosive qualities of his visionary art: it has 'burst the framework assigned to it by the universities' (Jung, 1967/1984: 84). The implications of such a dramatic development of an area of intellectual enquiry are mitigated by the assertion that Jung claims no grand narrative. His psychology is not an over-arching structure of knowledge. No one psychological approach can promote itself as orthodox dogma. As a psychologist, Jung is merely building hypotheses upon his own partly subjective premises (Jung, 1967/1984: 84-5). 20 Jung uses spatial metaphors to suggest that psychology can expand into other areas without dominating them or violating their 'differences'. In effect he is starting to answer some of the problems about psychology mastering art criticism set up in the earlier essay on poetry. The figure he uses to suggest range without aggressive invasion is that of the psychology as a quest for truth into foreign realms. He 'must abandon his thickly walled specialist fortress and set out on the quest for truth' (ibid.: 85). A quest suggests that the 'truth' sought for will be hard-won, its seizure will be fraught with dangers, and both the questor and the treasure itself may be transformed by the adventure. Of course, the quest is also the narrative genre of the hero myth. It carries overtones of the masculine ego seeking validation through appropriating the 'other' (truth) rather than making peace with it. Still, the insistence on leaving the 'thickly walled specialist fortress' is indicative of the risks to both the knower and the known (the ego and 'his' desire for rational cognition) that Jung is prepared to take. He makes it clear that this quest should not be an 'encroachment' on the territory of the literary critic. Just as he cannot provide a complete theory of the psyche, so he will not attempt a comprehensive account of literature. In order to make the distinction between a psychology that would colonise art and his own designs, Jung metonymically displaces psychology, his avowed profession, into science. 'Science' here is that body which would characteristically impose causal explanations for art. Science would make diagnoses and the art would disappear into pathological symptoms. Only aesthetics is distinguished by the principle that 'a psychic product can 21 be regarded as existing in and for itself' (Jung, 1930/1950/1966, CW15: para. 135). Jung is indeed on a quest, but in describing himself as having left the fortress of his specialism as science, he proves to have brought with him something innate to his psychology. For here he describes as fundamental to aesthetics the position we know to be his own on symbolic art from the earlier essay; a position he will soon allot in this text to visionary art. Far bolder than before, Jung is prepared to venture outside the fortress of psychology as science in order to secure aesthetics as within his psychology; its foreign heart stands for the unknown collective unconscious. In fact, the extent and depth of Jung's quest identity in this essay only becomes truly apparent at the sublime spectre of the visionary. For the territorial spatial metaphor of different disciplines abutting each other is radically overthrown by the eruption of height and depth. The visionary is the matter of endless heights and unfathomable abysses. It metaphorically undermines Jung's landscape of quest through the fields of knowledge, by summoning a chaos that overwhelms direction, even and especially, the direction of Jung's argument. Then, at the moment of greatest peril, there is a touch of the domestic. Visionary art is suffused with archetypal energies that tear aside the curtain upon which ordinary reality is imaged. But the primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomable abyss of the unborn and of things yet to be. (ibid.: para. 141) It is as if on one level we are reminded that domesticity as a core of civilisation is 22 fragile, and therefore a suitable metaphor for the domestic architecture of the ego. This is an essay about not being at home in the psyche. Whereas the tone of the 'Poetry' text was sanguine about symbolically charged art, its 'blood' vital and coursing, later Jung seems more aware of the daemonic possibilities of the defeat of reason. Jung's Myth of Modernity Such tremendous intuitions lead Jung to develop a fully-fledged myth of modernity. The post-Enlightenment West is characterised by a turning away from the recognition of the limitless potentials of the psyche. It has erected a 'shield of science and reason' to screen out uncomfortable manifestations of the unconscious (ibid.: para. 148). Whereas pre-modern peoples possessed a technology for collectively regulating the psyche in magic and propitiatory rituals, modernity is pitifully unaware of the probable consequences of ignoring the human hunger for the irrational. Jung again identifies the scientific approach to literature with Freudian attempts at causal explanations, while arguing that such a scheme is wholly inadequate to account for visionary art (ibid.: para 144). Now for visionary art, the emphasis has shifted from 'On Analytical Psychology in Relation to Poetry'. There the inadequacies of scientific language were explored, yet its very lack was seen as creating a necessary critical distance. Here Jung seems to be finding it more difficult to respond to daemonic unfathomability in the language of reason. So he turns deliberately to myth. The sublime visionary is of itself unrepresentable because it is the defeat of all cultural codes of understanding. Myth is a necessary resource because it preserves something of the numinous collective nature of the visionary, while at the same time 23 managing its dangerous volatility by transmuting it into something less devastating to the ego. It is the proper role of the psychologist to bring myth - in multiple and comparative modes - to try to shape what can never be wholly accounted for in rational speech. [I]t is so dark and amorphous that it requires the related mythological imagery to give it form. In itself it is wordless and imageless, for... it is nothing but a tremendous intuition striving for expression... (ibid.: para 151) Still convinced that visionary art plays a vital compensatory role in culture, what comes to the fore in this essay is a gnawing anxiety about the vulnerability of modernity. Art, like dreams, has the power to heal by taking the compensatory function of dreams into collective consciousness. Jung even gives rare examples of how archetypal intuitions might take on 'modern dress' in contemporary dreams. Aircraft might be the equivalent of a mythological eagle, Pluto may lurk in a careless chauffeur, a woman selling vegetables is an earth mother while a railway crash may stand for the fight with a dragon (ibid.: para. 152). There is a palpable sense of relief in Jung's turn to myth in this essay. It even provides a way back to science, on his own terms. What is needed is a science based on myth that refuses to replicate the errors of over-rational modernity. Integral to mythical language is the refusal to reduce the impersonality of the collective unconscious to the personality of the artist. The visionary work of art is like a child leaving the body of its artist-mother, giving the creative process a 'feminine quality... from the realm of the mothers' (ibid.: para. 159). 24 Again, in the progress of the visionary artist, Jung's writing enacts what he is describing. Embarked upon a quest into the psychic sources of art, Jung lost his bearings and suffered terrifying intimations of conceptual and mental chaos. In suggesting that only a 'science' of myth can both stabilize and map the annihilation of critical distance in the artist and his audience, he produces his own myth of modernity. 'Psychology and Literature' is a process of mythmaking laid bare: it is itself a creative work that transforms the mythological qualities of the psyche in art into a larger myth of the modern world. For the fortress of 'scientific psychology' has come to function as a constricting metonym for modernity itself. Popular Mythmaking beyond Jung's Division into Psychological/Visionary Consequently, it is not surprising that the retention of the binary frame in the division of art into 'psychological' and 'visionary' proves problematic. Visionary art answers the thirst of the age. It is the compensatory dream of the collective culture. However, Jung acknowledges, not only is visionary art sometimes mistaken for psychological and vice versa, its cultural location cannot be securely pin pointed. 'High' or culturally valued art may be visionary or psychological and so may be popular or 'low' art forms. It is notable that Jung includes the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle, and the whole genre of the detective story, as well as the imperial fantasies of Rider Haggard in the category of the visionary (ibid.: para. 137). Interestingly, both Haggard and Conan Doyle could be accused of popularising genres strongly allied to powerful myths of modernity: that of the triumph of scientific reason in Holmesian detection and of western colonialism for Haggard. It could be argued 25 that such writers bring into overt cultural consumption obscured mythical structures. Such elements are both supportive of contemporary cultural practices and contain - in the plural possibilities of myth - a counter argument exposing darkness, failure and cruelty. In 'Psychology and Literature', Jung's quest leads him to adopt some of the customs of other realms. Like the artist, he becomes a mythmaker for his age; perhaps even anticipating the erosion of the division between 'high' and popular art in postmodernity. I will now look at Jung's literary criticism of a seminal modern work, Ulysses by James Joyce. 'ULYSSES: A MONOLOGUE (JUNG, 1932/1966, CW15) Jung's 'Ulysses' is an account of the act of reading James Joyce's long experimental novel of that title. It is an astonishing encounter with the literary text as 'other', in which Jung suffers in body and soul. Confounded, bored, repeatedly sent to sleep, he cannot cope with the novel as a conventional reader. In desperation he embarks upon his only other option: to adopt his therapeutic methods for himself and for the novel. What he gives his reader is a dramatic staging of reading as a traumatic event. Again, disciplinary frameworks are invoked with sensitivity to the possibility of doing violence to the integrity of the other. The essay progresses through five movements. In the first stage, he argues that the bodily paralysis he experiences, is matched by the bodily non-cerebral quality of the novel. He calls Ulysses a tapeworm epic. Secondly, somatic distress leads Jung to reach for his professional identity as the only way of rousing his intellect and psyche. A third movement expresses the need, in an evocative image, to 'find a scaffold' for a meaningful response (ibid.: para. 169). Marking a fourth stage is the astounding 26 conclusion that so profound is the novel's rendering of consciousness in multiple voices that it has become the mysterious Jungian 'self'. Finally and very seriously, Jung links this piece of modernist art to the weakened condition of the modern European. The essay ends with a provocative flourish: 'I am now getting on pretty well with my reading of Ulysses - forward!' (ibid.: para. 203). Whatever the essay does for Jung's reader; writing it seems to have liberated his own psyche. Reading the Body and the Tapeworm Epic One idiosyncratic step on Jung's part is only apparent later in his text. Where most readers identify the character Leopold Bloom, meandering around the Dublin of 1904, with the mythical traveler, Ulysses or Odysseus, Jung does not. He takes the novel title literally. For him, Ulysses is the many narrative voices and linguistic styles that make up the whole novel. You could say that Ulysses is the novel Ulysses as a 'being' if not accurately a 'personality'. Therefore Jung opens by citing the passivity of Ulysses-narrator; he is a non-unified perceiving consciousness, a series of fragmented bodily stimuli. This Ulysses is almost a machine in the identification with physical senses; it is modern man as merged with technology. Joyce's Ulysses... is a passive, merely perceiving consciousness, a mere eye, ear, nose, and mouth, a sensory nerve exposed with choice or check to the roaring chaotic, lunatic cataract of psychic and physical happenings, and registering all this with almost photographic accuracy. (ibid.: para. 163) 27 As a result of the obsessive concentration on the senses, the book itself is 'senseless'. The reader is therefore forced into becoming Ulysses; a wanderer from one meaningless event to the next. Such emptiness has a psychological counterpart of horror and despair. Jung records falling asleep twice on the way to page 135 (ibid.: para. 165). He argues that the novel reveals the Joycean mind as cold-blooded and the text the offspring of 'visceral thinking' (ibid.: para. 166). In an image uniting the mental characteristics of the act of creation and the work, the novel is a worm written by a worm-like brain-less organ. If worms were gifted with literary powers they would write with the sympathetic nervous system for lack of a brain. (ibid.: para.166) Moreover this species of worm literature is not confined to a portrayal of the outer skin of the world. Ulysses mingles subjective and objective so that the worm image begins to suggest inner and even cosmic qualities (ibid.: para. 166). It is a neat demonstration of Jung's contention that body and psyche are united, with neither one able to subordinate the representation of the other. Jung flourishes the 'fabulously procreative' tapeworm as a cosmos breeding endless Joycean chapters (ibid.: para. 166). A sense of the novel as energetically generative is not accompanied by joyful comprehension. On the contrary, Jung the intrepid reader is depressed and feels fooled by the absence of recognizable meaning. It occurs to him that perhaps the novel is not even trying to 'represent' anything at all in its mindless sensory physicality (ibid.: para. 28 167). Doctoring the Text Frustrated and forced to feel inferior, Jung, in some desperation, tries to recover his intellectual confidence by resorting to his professional role. Significantly, his attention is directed not to the book - an instance of his distrust of clinical diagnoses of works of art - but to himself as the receiving psyche. He starts to examine his own baffled irritated reactions (ibid.: para. 168). Freed up by the switch of approach, Jung's meditation on the human body as source and subject begins to expand spatially and temporally. As a conversation with the intestines, the novel is saurian - pre-human, evoking figures of stone and the terrifying unconscious 'otherness' of nature. In this underworld there is no distinction between ego and other; the monstrous authorial being is everywhere and everything. From this stony underworld there rises up the vision of the tapeworm... In every segment of the book, however small, Joyce himself is the sole content of the segment... It is the boredom of nature... (ibid.: para. 169) The novel is not a human character or a personality: it is a being. Perhaps the saurian reference suggests pre-Oedipal (and so pre-human) unconsciousness prior to the construction of the ego in early infancy. Consequently, Ulysses is 'art in reverse, a backside of art' (ibid.: para. 178). It turns what Jung has described as visionary art with its intimations of transcendence, into bodily abjection. Or as Jung puts it, '[e]schatology becomes scatology', in this response to modernity (ibid.: para. 195). 29 Finding a Scaffold However, a condition of the therapeutic framework is that it is inevitably interested in process and teleology. Where is the novel going? Or more accurately, where is the impact of the novel upon the reader's psyche going? What is the effect of the reduction, which is perhaps also a regression, of humanity to a worm-like condition? Jung's teleological psyche means that we can only truly know the present by including the perspective of the future: for culture as well as for the individual. So he diagnoses that the coldness and unrelenting sensory observation of Ulysses is the apotheosis of modern consciousness, so persistently attuned to matter. Jung suggests that the goal of the work is to embody a detachment of consciousness; the whole novel is a great moon-like eye. It is a union of body with psyche so complete that it ignores those inner demons that threaten to over-master consciousness: ' in thrall neither to the gods nor to sensuality' (ibid.: para. 186). The reader becomes the many narrative eyes of Ulysses in a fusion of bodily sense with consciousness. This, surely, is its real secret, the secret of a new cosmic consciousness; and it is revealed not to him who has conscientiously waded through the seven hundred and thirty five pages, but to him who has gazed at his world and his own mind for seven hundred and thirty five days with the eyes of Ulysses. (ibid.: para. 186) Ulysses is a novel that enacts the triumph of western consciousness. It is a performance rather than a representation. It structures a mask of consciousness in the act of reading. 30 For these reasons the novel proves resistant to most of the conceptual tools at Jung, the psychologist's, disposal. There is something schizophrenic about its alienation yet it does not display the lack of control of the illness. Much more worrying for the Jungian literary critic, is that the archetypal armoury is also not up to the job. So wedded to consciousness is the novel, that it cannot be described as either psychological or visionary. Far from the intelligibility of the 'psychological' novel, Ulysses also fails to be visionary in pointing to the unknown. It is not a dream (ibid.: para. 185). Similarly, when Jung casts around for an archetypal background and comes up with Molly Bloom as an anima figure, he has to concede that that is not really what the book is about as it's true subject is objective consciousness (ibid.: para. 185). By the end of the essay, only Jung's belief that a work of art is profoundly cultural, as either compensatory or revelatory of collective consciousness, will enable him to draw conclusions. To do this Jung needs to explore further the nature of Ulysses's modern consciousness and its function for its writer. Ulysses the novel resists causal explanations. Jung distrusts them anyway as they too easily become 'scientific' reductions of the power of art to confound and disturb the psyche. He also resists biographical criticism while conceding that Joyce's Irish Catholic background is the conduit for the medieval concentration on the desouled body. It is not, however, the sufficient explanation for it. Very subtly, Jung produces the figure of 'scaffolding' for the narrative understanding of a work of art. 'Themes are unavoidable, they are the scaffolding for all psychic happenings', he pronounces (ibid.: para. 169). He thereby detaches a critical narrative from a causal 'explanation'. 31 Scaffolding is not an integral part of a building. It is an addition, a supplement, erected temporarily to contain a crisis for the purpose of repairs. Indeed scaffolding is a liminal structure between the outside and the inside. Jung suggests that the reader both detects and erects themes just as a scaffolding respects, yet is an addition to, a preexisting work. A narrative understanding of art does not need to dismantle it, nor to excavate a causal explanation by digging up the foundations to have a look. Such 'scientific' causal approaches are both destructive of the work and ignore the aesthetic appreciation of the building. 'Scaffolding' may be a necessary intervention for a work that has induced trauma in the reader. It enables the reader to stabilize her mental environment without violating the essential integrity or 'otherness' of the work. It is literary criticism drawing upon insights from other disciplines as temporary aids, not as a bulldozer. Of course, hidden within the word 'scaffolding' is 'scaffold', a public structure from which criminals were once hanged. Jung suggests that for powerful works of art the reader needs to 'add' something out of her own psychic processing of the text; something that will erect a structure to contain the trauma. Yet what is erected could itself prove the means of augmenting its lethal potency. Literary criticism need not be safe and recuperative, as Jung goes on to show in finding in Ulysses an indictment of western modernity. As a work of creative destruction, Ulysses is part of Joyce's forward looking search for unity of personality within the fragmented consciousness of modernity. If considered causally related to the author, then Joyce would appear as a mere victim of his repressive Catholic origins. On the other hand, if granted the scaffolding of a 32 teleological perspective, he is a reformer, who is currently enacting the stage of nullifying the corrupt heritage (ibid.: para. 183). Joyce is even a prophet as his soulless, heartless novel implicitly denounces the 'hideous sentimentality' of his epoch (ibid.: para. 183) Ulysses as Jungian Self Focused by the (scaffolding) theme of cultural reform, Ulysses is a spiritual exercise in consciousness; it functions as an 'eye' for perceiving the world. That does not mean, as Jung goes on to specify, that the novel is all ego. On the contrary, the ego, with its organising, lucid properties, has dissolved into multiplicity. Ulysses is so complete that it amounts to a cosmos, yet so multifarious that it subsumes any centre of egounderstanding. Joyce is everywhere in the novel and is everything: there is no selfother dynamic in the work. Quite unlike many conventional Jungian approaches, the novel is not symbolically pointing to the unknown in a structure that pre-supposes an observing self-conscious ego. Rather, the heaving visceral life of the Ulysses narrator is the self. Against the vastness of this novel self, the author, Joyce, is merely an ego complex. The ego of the creator of these figures... had dissolved into the countless figures of Ulysses. And yet, or rather for that very reason, all and everything... is Joyce himself... not the ego but the self. For the self alone embraces the ego and the non-ego... (ibid.: para. 188) Ulysses is the self as creator-god, the higher being who can return home only when he has achieved detachment from both mind and matter (ibid.: para. 192). In this sense 33 only is the many voiced Ulysses what Jung calls a symbol. He is a symbol of the self as totality. Here the novel works as a symbol in the mind of the reader by enacting totality: it can never be completely represented for it includes the irrepresentible 'other'. In the reader's psyche the novel is sublime, pointing to what is not yet, and can never be wholly, known. In this most imaginative act of Jungian literary criticism, Jung here explores the implications of this narrator as self. 'He' is a being of extreme plurality. 'His' expansiveness subsumes personality and gender since 'he' is not only all the characters in the novel, but is also a monstrous being composed of all the houses, pubs, activities, the drama, the weather, food, drink; everything made into consciousness (ibid.: para. 198). The only trace of an individuation narrative within Jung's account is his perception of the novel's ending. In the final moments, there appears to be an evolution within the self of masculine creativity into feminine acquiescence. And existence beyond extreme consciousness takes Jung's reading further into topos of the reformer, the cultural critic. The Critique of the Western Subject Jung's essay ends with a profound sense of the novel as a dynamic cultural artifact. Ulysses is a meditation on western material consciousness that seeks to be part of its transformation. This literary work goes so deep into the western obsession with matter that it achieves a detached consciousness. Consequently, it performs a spiritual exercise for its culture; it is a catalyst of a new consciousness, an escape from blind entanglement in matter. 34 O Ulysses, you are truly a devotional book for the object-besotted, objectridden white man! You are a spiritual exercise, an ascetic discipline, an agonising ritual... (ibid.: para. 201) When Jung addresses the novel, O Ulysses, it is a sign, literally an acting out, of distance. Beginning the essay in blind, paralysing immersion in the text, Jung shows how his self-analysis of its effects has enabled the 'critical distance' of a critic without the resort to the conceptual language of the scientist that he identified as problematic in the 'Poetry' essay. Jung, the literary critic has achieved a response to art in which his professional identity as psychologist is liminal to his aesthetic sense. The early stages of Jung, irritated, falling asleep over is reading, is his entanglement in matter. He is possessed by the other; his ego is swamped, and, at first, he is in danger of being reduced to mindless bodily responses in sleep. The scaffolding that can free his ego from the other, the text, is initially only available through the desperate resort of assuming his doctor persona. At his disposal are therapeutic techniques and the belief that both psyche and cultures have a teleological drive to re-make consciousness. It this tenet that provides the scaffolding to make a narrative that is both an aesthetic act of criticism and one of self-therapy: as long as the 'other' is respected as other, then the two activities can become a mutual dialogue. Jung's criticism of Ulysses demonstrates an act of individuation (through reading) with the other that is the novel. The spiritual exercise for white western man that he evokes at the end of his essay has already taken place in the essay itself. The essay is no record: it acts out individuation as a cultural and psychic event. We witness the 35 very immersion, struggle for meaning, and then detachment from the dreamimage/text/event/person etc., with a changed consciousness that is the habitual path of individuation. Here literary criticism is individuation because the achievement of critical distance, the ability to say something meaningful about the novel, is the hard won struggle of the ego to separate from, and simultaneously maintain a connection to, the other. Perhaps Jung's 'Ulysses' essay provides a deeper clue as to why literary studies has found the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition more congenial. Literary history, by its nature, looks back. It understands a model that looks back to psychic origins in satisfactorily comprehensive ways. Jung can do this too, for example in discussing the medieval Catholic heritage of Joyce as exerting a peculiar psychic pressure on the text. Yet principally, Jung sees works of art as both compensatory and forward-looking. In particular, visionary or symbolic art, channels the energies of the collective unconscious as an 'objective' cultural phenomenon. Ulysses compensates the hideous sentimentality of post-Victorian modernity and offers a spiritual journey towards a detachment from western materialism. Ultimately, to Jung, we are all Ulysses. His final remark betrays his own acknowledgement that he may reach Ithaca, arrive 'home' re-made. The fragmented alienated modern consciousness registering only sensation at the start of the 'Ulysses' essay, may finally have a vision of home in modernity. Concluding remark: I am now getting on pretty well with my reading of Ulysses - forward! (ibid.: para. 203) 36 Although the wanderer is heading home, he is not doing so by re-tracing his steps. No looking back. CONCLUSION It goes without saying that in the two essays on literature and in the act of criticism, Jung is primarily interested in the relations between consciousness and unconsciousness. What is less obvious is his focus on 'knowledge' or 'theory' as problematic. Anything derived merely from rationality risks being profoundly inauthentic unless it also bears witness to the destabilising presence of unconsciousness. To encounter a work of art is to be in the presence of something not derived from one's own known psyche: it is to encounter the other. Jung's concern not to make one discipline master another, is of a piece with his insight that what the ego brings to understanding the other should be regarded as only one aspect of art criticism. The three essays analysed here show Jung working through the problems of 'psychology' commenting on 'literature'. In the end he provides a model for a Jungian literary criticism that blends the modes of different disciplines without reducing art to symptoms or 'evidence' for another cultural activity. These texts show Jung eroding the division between science and art and figuring a liminal space between them for his psychology. Later chapters of this book will examine this attitude further. Revealing a penchant for spatial metaphors, which will prove characteristic, Jung portrays disciplines as the cultivated pastures of the ego. Where literature and art point 37 to the as yet unknown and unknowable, the ego's ground must be re-made. Jung is even willing to question his own formulations to indicate the provisional quality of his theorising. For Ulysses surely is both a visionary and psychological novel. Apparently a creature of soulless consciousness, Ulysses is a psychological novel so intensely expressive of the known world that it makes consciousness mysterious. Perhaps it is 'psychological' with respect to its author and 'visionary' to the culture (for which it provides an archetypal, collective transformation). In identifying this work with an image of the self for western modernity, Jung brings together the collective culture with the cosmos. No literary critic could be more ambitious, or more provocative. 38