a jungian reading of the hero’s journey
DESCRIPTION
I use Jungian psychology to show literature's strong relation to every day life, Speculative Fiction's capacity to facilitiate psychic and social development, and how Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed offers valuable insights to the human condition.TRANSCRIPT
A Jungian Reading of the Hero’s Journey Page 2
http://acoldandlonelystreet.blogspot.com/ Ash Hibbert
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Contents
Abbreviations 4
Introduction 6
Chapter 1: The Hero and the Shadow 10
Literary Active Imagination 11
Implications of Literary Active Imagination 14
Reconciliation with the Shadow 17
Chapter 2: The Hero and Androgyny 22
Androgyny 22
Reconciliation with the Anima 24
Chapter 3: The Hero and their Community 30
Vision and Truth 31
Ego and the Unconscious 34
The Community 38
Passing the Torch 40
The Spiral-Shaped Journey 42
Reconciliation with the Persona 44
Conclusion 49
Appendix - Synopsis 51
Chapter 2 (25-54) 51
Chapter 4 (78-105) 52
Chapter 6 (129-59) 53
Chapter 8 (194-223) 53
Chapter 10 (254-76) 53
Chapter 1 (5-24) 54
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Chapter 3 (55-77) 54
Chapter 5 (106-28) 54
Chapter 9 (224-53) 55
Chapter 11 (277-89) 55
Chapter 13 (313-9) 56
Bibliography 57
Primary Texts 57
Works Cited 58
Works Consulted 61
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Abbreviations
Parenthetical page numbers refer to Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. London:
Orion Publishing Group, 1999.
‘CW’ refers to The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vols. 1-22 edited by Sir Herbert
Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, translated by R.F.C. Hull. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1953-<1991>
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Introduction
I will be using Jungian psychology to show how literature strongly relates to
everyday life, how Speculative Fiction is especially capable of helping facilitate
psychic and social development, and how Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed
offers valuable insights to the human condition.
The Dispossessed, as well as being Speculative Fiction, is about an individual. Le
Guin’s essay on the importance of a realistic protagonist, ‘Science Fiction and Mrs.
Brown’ (Language of the Night 112), emphasizes how The Dispossessed, and all of
its characters, grew out of a vision of a person. Le Guin’s adamant privileging of the
individual in The Dispossessed makes it an ideal novel for an exploration of a model
of personal development.
Jungian Psychology will assist in reading The Dispossessed by focusing on the main
protagonist, Shevek. While characters do not possess an unconscious or
subconscious (Stiller 36; also see Holland ‘Shakespearian Tragedy’ 207-17, and
Holland Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare) they are the canvas that receives the
projection of both the writer and reader’s ego - Shevek can thus be situated as the
exclusive ‘ego’ of the novel as he is the “primary carrier” of Le Guin’s unconscious
personality (Cambridge Companion to Jung 256-7; see also Franz An Introduction to
the Interpretation of Fairy Tales). This illustrates Le Guin’s particular investment in
realistically developing Shevek.
In spite of its shortfalls, Jung’s psychology remains an authorized (CW 15 par. 133)
and useful tool for feminist and non-feminist critics alike to read literature by
(Lauter and Rupprecht 3). Robert Segal highlights that while Freud is useful to
understand an individual in their early years, Jung is useful to understand the latter
years (Jung on Mythology 8-9). While Shevek’s infancy, childhood, and youth is
highly relevant to his later development, it is only detailed in one of the novel’s
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thirteen chapters, thus providing far less material to work with compared to the rest
of his life. The exclusion of Freud from an analysis of Shevek, then, is not from
loyalty to Jung -Jung’s theories are simply more pertinent.
Jung and Le Guin also hold very similar views on personal development of the
individual and it is in part due to their similarities that I will use an allegorical
reading of The Dispossessed to illustrate Jung’s views. Though this approach is but
one of many possible ways of reading the novel and characters, I plan to demonstrate
the success of a Jungian reading of Le Guin’s work even though Le Guin is not
Jungian (Rochelle 31n.120). Rather, I intend to demonstrate that Le Guin,
especially in light of The Dispossessed, shares similar views on the human
condition with Jung. I will also briefly discuss Orson Scott Card’s Enders Quartet,
which also reflects views similar to Jung.
Jungian psychology will also be useful as the mode of communication between Le
Guin and mythologist Joseph Campbell whose model of the hero’s journey I will
explore. Campbell preferred Jung’s view on myth to Freud’s because of Jung’s view
that “the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life furthering ends”,
contrast to Freud who saw myths as “errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted
finally by science” (Myths to Live By 12-3). Yet while Segal describes Campbell as
“Jungian-oriented” (Jung on Mythology 13) he is also described as “too eclectic to
qualify as a full-fledged Jungian” (43). Campbell “praises Jung rather than defers to
him” (125-6).
Both Jung and Campbell attributing the origins of myth to Independent Invention,
yet while Campbell saw the invention of myth arising through commonly shared
experiences, Jung attributed myth to Independent Invention through heredity –
specifically through the inheritance of archetypes (Joseph Campbell 126-30).
Moreover, like Jung, Campbell saw myth as revealing
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The existence of a severed, deeper reality … as a vehicle for
actually encountering that reality [and] as a model for others. But
where for Jung myth fulfils these functions even when its meaning
remains unconscious, for Campbell myth works only when ‘sages’
reveal its meaning. (131).
Campbell also saw myths as linking people to the cosmos, society, and themselves
(131). Compared to Jung, Campbell is a transcendental mystic who “preaches
absorption in the unconscious” – while Jung is an immanent who “preaches balance:
neither rejection of the unconscious nor surrender to it” (133).
Since Pearson and Pope’s landmark Female Hero in American and British
Literature however, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces has been less of an
affirmative touchstone for the hero’s journey and more used as sport by Feminists.
Pearson and Pope attempt to make up for Campbell’s poor representation of women
in his model of the hero, but even their title suggests that the endeavour to find a
model of the hero’s journey applicable to both men and women is far from
complete. Jung’s notions of androgyny and the contrasexual figure offer a remedy
for the gender exclusivity of Campbell, Pearson and Pope, and thus it will be
helpful in an attempt to include both men and women in a single model of the hero’s
journey.
Another shortfall of Campbell is the absence of a balanced, egalitarian relationship
portrayed between the hero and their community. Campbell, while constantly
privileging the hero and casting them as fitting to become tyrant of their world
shows the hero as a timeless instrument of their community. Subsequently, I will
endeavour to highlight ways in which The Dispossessed challenges Campbell, by
providing models of relationships between individual and community, man and
woman, based less on mutual use and more on mutual respect.
Finally, a Jungian analysis of Shevek provides an illustration of Jung’s concept of
the Archetype – of their personal characteristics, and of the unmediated relationship
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that can be formed between them and the ego.
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Chapter 1: The Hero and the Shadow
This chapter will, like those following, attempt to link literature with personal
development. In this chapter, I will specifically be drawing from the Jungian practice
of Active Imagination, and Jung’s notion of the reconciliation with the shadow figure.
The approach of this chapter is indicative of the trend in the latter chapters: to show
Jungian psychology as useful in challenging conventional notions of, and
approaches to, the hero’s journey. This challenge precedes a demonstration of how
Shevek, as the vehicle of Le Guin’s Jungian-like sentiments, specifically illustrates
the way that readers can live out that alternate model. Shevek’s acts of
reconciliation with the archetypal figures represented by some of the characters,
which become the focus towards the end of each chapter here, are valuable as a
literal model for readers’ own personal development. I will also highlight instances
where The Dispossessed provides counter-examples – where Shevek and other
characters fall victim to possession by, and projection of, archetypal figures.
Shevek’s acts of reconciliation are also useful as a medium for the audience’s own
development - a potential that Appleyard suggests in school-age readers (14) and
that I will suggest is available to all readers.
While Appleyard condemns uncritical or precritical approaches to reading (2) his
descriptions of what motivates lay-reading outside of academia highlights such
readers’ yearning for relevancy (1). Though some of the subsequent strategies used
by lay-readers to gain a sense of relevancy can be highly questionable (1) the desire
to find meaning in one’s life is of pure intent. Just as traditional literary criticism
aims to help inform the dialogue that we establish between ourselves and a text
(Novels for Students xi), so too does the spontaneous form of reader response
endeavour to bridge a link between author and audience. Great novels “force us to
think – about life, literature, and about others, not just about ourselves” (xi). The
question thus becomes whether a model of reader response that is personal, active,
and encourages us to understand ourselves in the context of the world, can offer the
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same if not a greater wealth of insights compared to traditional literary criticism and
help unlock the greatness of a novel.
I believe that it can.
Literary Active Imagination
Speculative Fiction writers, in order to avoid fulfilling the Freudian opinion “that
all artists are undeveloped personalities with marked infantile autoerotic traits” (CW
15 par. 156), need to go beyond writing fiction that is simply “wet dreams” (Le Guin
Compass Rose 220). Le Guin navigates around the Freudian stereotype by
considering the results of her creative processes to be Thought Experiments –
“devices of the imagination used to investigate nature” (Brown ‘Thought
Experiments’). In the context of Speculative Fiction, the Thought Experiment is a
case of detective work into our social and personal beings, compatible and
comparable with Jung’s concept of Active Imagination.
Active Imagination is a Jungian term to denote a process of becoming conscious of
deep, repressed childhood complexes, as well as developing orientating insights,
using play (Chodorow 2). It is “a method Jung developed to induce an active
dialogue with the unconscious while in a waking state” (Cambridge Companion to
Jung 314). The process of Active Imagination involves two major stages:
In his discussion of the first step, Jung speaks of the need for
systematic exercises to eliminate critical attention and produce a
vacuum in consciousness … It involves a suspension of our rational,
critical faculties in order to give free rein to fantasy … Jung speaks of
the first step in terms of wu wei, that is, the Taoist idea of letting
things happen … In the second part of active imagination,
consciousness takes the lead. As the affects and images of the
unconscious flow into awareness, the ego enters actively into the
experience. This part might begin with a spontaneous string of
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insights; the larger task of evaluating and integration remains. In the
German language, this is the auseinandersetzung [which is] usually
translated as ‘coming to terms’ with the unconscious. (Chodorow 10-
11)
A classic example of the use of Active Imagination is the first recorded under that
term, around Christmas 1912. It occurred when, after his break with Freud, Jung
sought to “bridge the distance from the present” (Jung Memories, Dreams,
Reflections 198) back to his childhood, in order to locate the cause of a disturbance in
his dream life. Jung managed to create this ‘bridge’ with pebbles – he began
collecting stones from the shore of a lake near his home, and used them to construct
miniature buildings. This re-enacted a childhood pastime and lead to the release of
“a stream of fantasies which [he] later carefully wrote down” (199).
Rowland, in C.G. Jung and Literary Theory draws strong comparisons between
Active Imagination and reading:
‘Active Imagination’ … involves the taking of an image from a
dream or a cultural text and concentrating on it, so relaxing the
conscious mind. The Jungian creative unconscious will then
spontaneously erupt and guide fantasies … Words on the page are
one step removed from visual images. Reading a fiction will provoke
mental images and these will be affected by the Jungian
unconscious [thus] reading fiction promotes individuation. (196)
Rowland argues that reading helps excavate unconscious material and promote
individuation. This process leads to “a more conscious awareness of one’s specific
individuality, including recognition of both one’s strengths and one’s limitations”
(Cambridge Companion to Jung 316). Rowland argues that using literature to
stimulate Active Imagination benefits both author and reader:
Writing fiction can also be absorbed into this model. If a writer is in
contact with her creative unconscious, then her writing will again be
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part of her individuation because the unconscious will guide the
psychic signifiers. The writing of art becomes an alchemic w(rite).
(196-7)
I would like to follow Susan Rowland’s lead from her discussion of Jungian theory
and reader response (196-7), and suggest that the Speculative Fiction genre is
specially suited to providing texts useful for facilitating Active Imagination. I will
refer to the form of reading that combines Literature, and Active Imagination, as
Literary Active Imagination.
Speculative Fiction embodies Fantasy, which is a ‘genre’ or mindset that as
children we were used to because it involved using forms of ‘play’. Therefore, it is
a suitable method for Active Imagination. A long-standing criticism of Speculative
Fiction is that it is escapist, and in Literary Active Imagination, there is a degree of
truth in this: the first stages of Active Imagination as outlined by Jung give the
imagination free reign to allow the conscious mind to depart the conventions and
restrictions of consensual reality. By practicing Active Imagination we ‘re-enact’
our childhood, temporarily regressing to our childhood state, and re-experience the
fears and anxieties that are the seed to our later complexes. However, since Jung
stresses that Active Imagination involves reflecting on the resultant fantasy, we
would then disengage from the process of play, and with the benefit of an adult’s
vocabulary and understanding, objectively analyse what emotions moved through us,
retrospectively nipping our complexes in the bud. The writer encouraging, and the
reader allowing, a suspension of disbelief when they engage with a text is
necessary in achieving Literary Active Imagination. The text would then need to be
sufficiently remarkable for the reader to consider the moral and ethical implications
in terms of their own lives, and thus gain new insights into both themselves and the
human condition.
Literary Active Imagination provides a model of fiction that prevents writing from
cultivating neurosis in the author, and instead speaks “from the mind and heart of the
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artist to the mind and heart of mankind” (CW 15 par. 156), by attempting to connect
people’s minds with their hearts. However, this is not to suggest that Literary
Active Imagination would avoid neurosis entirely. Instead, Active Imagination gives
neuroses free rein to express themselves. The darkest, ‘wettest’ dream that the
author can imagine would manifest itself on paper. Yet what separates Literary
Active Imagination from becoming self-indulgent writing is that the former allows an
‘ambushing’ of the neurosis once it is out in the open. Once the neurosis is let ‘be’,
the reader brings the social element into play, and they can then trace the neurosis
back to its root.
This process of temporarily surrendering to one’s neurosis shares parallels with
Jung’s theory of releasing libido through regression:
It (regression) contains both the illness and the potential cure … The
ability to regress, particularly to go through and beyond childhood
conflicts and trauma, is another of the psyche’s self-regulating
mechanisms (Cambridge Companion to Jung 64; emphasis added).
Speculative Fiction can clearly help facilitate Active Imagination, and induce that
childhood state, and because Speculative Fiction must encourage a suspension of
disbelief, it can encourage a revaluation of one’s worldviews.
Implications of Literary Active Imagination
While psychological readings of texts can set out to illuminate the intentions,
motives, and desires of the author, more often than not the critical process reveals
many of the prejudices of the critics themselves. While Jung warns writers that the
more personal idiosyncrasies in a creation “the less it is a work of art” (CW 15 par.
156), superimposing personal idiosyncrasies on a work can be as destructive as if the
author had written them in, in the first place (par. 134). Critics can hypothesise what
the author ‘intended’, yet only for the exclusive purpose of opening ourselves to
alternative readings of the text.
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Writing, Jung suggests, can be an opportunity for the writer to achieve a greater
awareness of himself or herself:
The creative urge which finds its clearest expression in art is irrational
and will in the end make a mockery of all our rationalistic
undertakings. All conscious psychic processes may well be causally
explicable; but the creative act, being rooted in the immensity of the
unconscious, will forever elude our attempts at understanding. It
describes itself only in its manifestations; it can be guessed at, but
never wholly grasped. (par. 135)
Jung would find agreement in at least some writers, including Le Guin, who explains
that rather than planning her fictitious universes ‘Earthsea’, she “found it … in [her]
subconscious” (Language of the Night 48):
I did not deliberately invent Earthsea. I did not think ‘Hey wow –
islands are archetypes and archipelagos are superarchetypes and
let’s build us an archipelago!’ I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I
discovered Earthsea. (49-50)
Le Guin’s perception of her work as resulting from hidden depths within herself (49-
50), and Joan Didion’s explanation that “I write entirely to find out what I’m
thinking … what I want and what I fear”, suggests that writers already (without the
assistance of Jungian critics) appreciate the therapeutic value that their writing has
for them. What remains is for the reader to come to a similar appreciation and to
investigate the personal implications of the text, to achieve greater understanding of
their own psyche, and thus to progress closer to an attainment of Self. Rather than
using literary criticism to locate the mental status of the author, using Literary
Active Imagination allows readers to find out what they themselves are thinking.
The reader’s task is to explore a number of their own emotive reactions to a text, and
then to try tracing those emotive responses back to their complexes. As Appleyard
demonstrates, however, there are many different and equally valid reasons people
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read - from building an understanding of social conventions (‘reader as hero or
heroine’), to better perceiving the nature of existence (‘reader as thinker’), to
simply completing their English Major (‘reader as interpreter’) (14).
It may be overly demanding to request that the way people read is accelerated (17).
As developmentalists would argue, an exploration of an individual’s own inner
world may be best left until the reader has firmly established a thorough
understanding of their natural, social, and intellectual world. This, Appleyard
suggests, is an undertaking available to the ‘pragmatic reader’ – an adult who reads
outside of any institutional requirements. Appleyard describes how the adult reader
May read in several ways, which mimic, though with appropriate
differences, the characteristic responses of each of the previous
roles: to escape, to judge the truth of experience, to gratify a sense
of beauty, to challenge oneself with new experience, to comfort
oneself with images of wisdom. What seems to be common to these
responses is that adult readers now much more consciously and
pragmatically choose the uses they make of reading. (15)
What I am very much interested in is a society that encourages people, at whatever
age, to take charge of the way that they read – specifically, to facilitate their own
bibliotherapy and text-driven development. Being neither a philologist nor child
psychologist it may be out of my jurisdiction to explore ways in which children
could become readers that are more pragmatic. However, what comes across from
Appleyard is that the different roles that readers take coincide with their
environment – the institution that the individual belongs to can regulate their
capacity to engage in a text. Thus, suggestions of how to create a generation of
young pragmatic readers would very likely be highly critical of those institutions.
Instead of criticizing the schooling system however, I will limit my exploration to
how adult readers could further their reading skills. Using Literary Active
Imagination, readers could engage in a single text with the whole spectrum of roles
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that Appleyard outlines. Clearly, each role carries within itself great value for the
reader, yet the full benefit of reading may only be attained through the capacity to
‘play’ every role within a single session. While the ‘pragmatic reader’ would appear
to already possess this versatility, Appleyard’s description of the adult reader is of
one who sets out to read a text with a set, and diluted, role. For instance, if an adult
is to read Speculative Fiction with an escapist agenda, the philosophical implications
of such a text would be lost. Also, even if they were to read a text as a ‘thinker’,
their adult sensibilities would prevent them from an adequate suspension of disbelief
required to fully entertain a new world outlook (17).
The developmental model of the five roles taken by readers (outlined by
Appleyard) parallels the stages of Active Imagination. As they mature, the reader
moves from a passive indulgence in fantasy that resembles wu wei, to a more active
analysis of the social and philosophical implications of the text – the
auseinandersetzung stage.
We can integrate Appleyard’s description of the ‘evolution’ of reader response theory
with Jung’s process of Active Imagination, to create a model where a reader can
undertake all four distinct roles in one sitting. Rather than reflecting on the cultural
implications of a text however, they should focus on their own personal response.
Engaging in a temporary, deliberate amnesia, the Jungian ‘Pragmatic Reader’
would forget all sensibilities and preconceived notions of the text’s genre, to read as
‘player’ and ‘hero(ine)’, and then to later reflect as ‘thinker’ and ‘interpreter’.
Reconciliation with the Shadow
The goal of Active Imagination shares strong parallels with Jung’s concept of
reconciliation with the Shadow – that is, “unconscious aspects of the personality
characterized by traits and attitudes which the conscious ego does not recognize in
him- or herself” (Cambridge Companion to Jung 319) – that only “becomes hostile
only when he is ignored or misunderstood.” (Man and his Symbols 182):
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If the shadow figure contains valuable, vital forces, they ought to be
assimilated into actual experience and not repressed. It is up to the
ego … to live out something that seems to be dark but actually may
not be. (184)
In addition, as Whitmont writes:
What seems evil, or at least meaningless and valueless to
contemporary experience and knowledge, might on a higher level of
experience and knowledge appear as the source of the bet –
everything depending, naturally, on the use one makes of one’s seven
devils. To explain them as meaningless robs the personality of its
proper shadow, and without this it loses its form. The living form
needs deep shadow if it is not to appear plastic. Without shadow it
remains a two- dimensional phantom, a more or less well brought up
child. (238-9)
In Literary Active Imagination, the audience could undergo the process Jung
referred to as the ‘withdrawal of projections’. Through the text’s protagonists, the
reader could reassume responsibility for those sins projected onto the protagonist’s
‘Shadow’ at the point in which the hero recognizes the similarities between
themselves and their nemesis (Hauge 76). This would allow the reader to adopt
those characteristics most useful at that point in life (Cambridge Companion to Jung
319).
Reconciliation with the Shadow can occur on a social scale (Wehr 61-2; Language of
the Night 64) as well as on a personal scale, illustrated by Shevek’s relationship with
Pae, a fellow scientist on Urras. From Shevek’s first night on Urras, Saio Pae
maintains a subtle yet significant presence in Shevek’s life. The first indication of
the danger that Pae presents comes to Shevek directly as a warning: “‘Pae isn’t
dangerous to you because he’s personally slippery, Shevek. He’s dangerous to you
because he is a loyal, ambitious agent of the Ioti Government’” (115). This recalls
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Campbell’s claim that the first opponent of the hero is the Patriot (Hero 389).
Pae assists Shevek’s transformation into a good Urrasti professor by taking him
shopping for clothes (110), yet his next major appearance is much darker, when
Shevek imagines seeing him at Vea’s party - “He thought he saw Pae across the
room, but there was so many faces that they blurred together … Something dark
turned over in Shevek’s mind, darkening everything” (189). This hallucination is
very telling and appropriate because of Shevek’s un-Odonian behaviour. It is almost
as if Pae is infiltrating Shevek’s psyche, possessing him, and transforming him into
an Urrasi. While at the party, Shevek becomes intoxicated, argues about the war,
self-righteously explains the superiority of Odonians over A-Iotians, and attempts
to force himself on Vea. The longer he spends on Urras, the more he becomes like
Pae. His hallucinations of Pae represent the manifestation of his dark side, his
shadow. A very telling remark of the bond between Pae and Shevek is when the latter
muses
He (Pae) had not done anything original, but his opportunism, his
sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time to the most
promising field. He had the flair for where to set work, just as Shevek
did, and Shevek respected it in him as in himself, for it is a singularly
important attribute in a scientist. (229)
The following morning, a hung-over Shevek realizes that Pae holds the key to the
“gracious prison cell” he is in (229). Very soon, however, he begins to reflect on
what he can extract from his prison warden:
He had come to Urras simply to meet Saio Pae, his enemy? That he
had come seeking him, knowing that he might receive from his
enemy what he could not receive from his brothers and friends, what
no Anarresi could give him: knowledge of the foreign, of the alien:
news … (230)
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This is a very important step according to Jung in the individual’s reconciliation
with the Shadow. Once Shevek has reconciled Pae, the shadow figure assumes a more
benign form (Man and His Symbols 119), and he is able to forget about him. Le
Guin’s decision to have Shevek abruptly and permanently reject Pae from his mind
may have been a result of her reading of the presence of benign animals in fairy tales:
Our instinct … is not blind. The animal does not reason, but it sees.
And it acts with certainty; it acts ‘rightly,’ appropriately. That is why
all animals are beautiful. It is the animal who knows the way, the
way home. It is the animal within us, the primitive, the dark brother,
the shadow soul, who is the guide … When you have followed the
animal instincts far enough, then they must be sacrificed, so that the
true self, the whole person, may step forth from the body of the
animal, reborn. (Language of the Night 67)
The alternative to reconciling with our Shadow is either to project our negative
characteristics onto others, or to become possessed by the Shadow. The first four
years that Shevek spends at Abbenay, for instance, sees Shevek under the control of
his own Shadow – “a collection of antisocial tendencies, his opposite or wicked self,
himself as self-hater and social rebel” (Lauter and Rupprecht 101), embodied by the
tyrant and parasite, Sabul. During those four years, Shevek lives in a room alone,
considers suicide, and Bedap describes him as a “revolutionary” (147). Le Guin
describes the destructive effect of being the controlled by one’s Shadow in her essay
‘The boy and his Shadow’ – her commentary on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1847
fairytale ‘The Shadow’:
When the shadow returns to the man in middle life, he has a second
chance. But he misses it, too. He confronts his dark self at last, but
instead of asserting equality or mastery, he lets it master him. He
gives in. He does, in fact, become the shadow’s shadow, and his fate
then is inevitable. The Princess Reason is cruel in having him
executed, and yet she is just. (Language of the Night 61)
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Another text that features a protagonist’s allegorical anima (which I will later
explore) and Shadow is in the Orson Scott Card’s Ender Quartet, specifically the
1985 novel Ender’s Game. Ender Wiggin - the third child of a family in a futuristic
society that allows only two children per couple out of a need for population control
– has two siblings: an older brother, Peter, and an older sister Valentine. In an
endeavour to train a child to lead a fleet of star ships in retaliation against an alien
race, the military has its hopes set on Peter, the first-born. Peter however turns out to
be too ruthless. The military turn their attention to the second born, Valentine, yet
she turns out to be too compassionate. Still confident in Ender’s parents to raise a
candidate warrior, the military permit Peter and Valentine’s parents to exceed the
general quota of children and so they conceive Ender.
Using the same allegorical reading of Ender’s Game as with The Dispossessed, Peter
represents Ender’s shadow. To survive as a child, and a student at the battle school,
he must take out all stops in order to hold his own, and he manages this by
becoming increasingly like Peter. He does this to the extent of inadvertently killing
two other youths in self-defence, so to discourage further attacks.
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Chapter 2: The Hero and Androgyny
Chapter 1 – The Hero and the Shadow – suggested an approach to reading
Speculative Fiction that adds to what might be exclusively an entertaining pass
time into an important therapeutic process. Literary Active Imagination encourages
readers to adopt a more disciplined approach to texts, where their emotive responses
are deconstructed and a more detailed appreciation of the roots of their responses is
developed. Using a similar process of introspection, empathizing with fictional and
literal bearers of those characteristics that may otherwise be stigmatized can help
readers develop themselves more fully, at the same time as humanizing and
personalizing victims of their own prejudices. Chapter 2 – The Hero and Androgyny
– suggests a similar method, whereby individuals can adopt characteristics of their
opposing sex regardless of social gender notions.
Androgyny
Heilbrun defines Androgyny as “a condition under which the characteristics of the
sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly
assigned” (x), while Stevenson suggests that “like sublimity, psychic androgyny –
the only kind worth writing about – is itself metaphysical, a transcendence of self and
sex in a moment of total otherness and integration.” (10) Androgyny has had an
appeal for the Ancient Greeks (Plato The Symposium 59), the romantic poets -
“The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous” (Collected Works of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge v.14:2; appendix H, par. 436) - and feminists from Woolf to the
present. Pearson and Pope for example suggest that the female’s journey culminates
in her ascension to androgyny:
… Having discovered that she has within her both male and female
attributes, the female hero discovers and affirms the full humanity
obscured by traditional sex roles. She learns to be autonomous and
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to achieve without exploiting or dominating others; and she learns
nurturance that is not accompanied by a denial of the self. With the
achievement of this unified vision, the hero is prepared to return to
the kingdom and to enjoy a new relationship with the world. (218-9)
Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, which subscribes to a Social Constructionist view of
gender, suggests a much more dramatic form of Androgyny than Jung, who
subscribes to the Innate Difference view:
Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a
vacillation from one sex the other takes place, and often it is only the
clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the
sex is the very opposite of what it is above. (121; emphasis added)
Sexual transformation, however, does not prevent the protagonist, Orlando, from
returning to being a ‘man’ – she now controls her gender, not by anything as radical
as transsexualism but simply transvestism, and thus enjoys “the love of both sexes
equally” (141). Like Shevek’s journey, Orlando’s journey may also be symbolic so
that Orlando, having realized that ‘clothes wear us’, wakes up one morning and
resolves to put on the appearance of a woman, and changes sex as easily as she
changes her clothes. The real change occurs within her mind, and reflects her own
sexual ambivalence. Sexuality, Woolf appears to argue, is a poor indicator of what
one’s gender should be.
Orlando and Jung concur that we can ‘break free’ of the sex that we were born with
and the gender that we may have grown quite used to after having it prescribed to us
for so long, and find our own destiny, adopting both masculine and feminine
qualities to suit our purpose. In isolation, and in their extremes, Orlando finds either
gender to be worth contempt (101-02), and that the harmony of Androgyny is the
preferable state. It is, both Jung and Woolf (205) argue, only through the
reconciliation of all gender- related characteristics of an individual that a fusion of
the self can be attained. In addition, just as Jung holds that only one who has
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reconciled their contrasexual figure can look upon a person of the opposite sex
without projecting that contrasexual figure, Woolf suggests that it is only through
assuming the gendered-perspective of the other sex that we can begin to come to
understand, and forgive members of that sex (107).
For those who find Woolf’s analogous image of androgyny - “two people (male and
female) getting into a cab” (Room of One’s Own 95) - “more suggestive of inner
conflict than of harmony or integration” (Attebery 130), Jung’s model for a
relationship between the ego and the various psychic forces may be more appealing.
With Jung, one ‘deals’ with the unconscious (Joseph Campbell 130), neither
surrendering to it nor rejecting it (133), deciding which features of the contrasexual
figure and shadow one will draw from. This contrasts with Campbell whose highly
phallocentric model for the hero’s journey involves atonement with the Father (Hero
130) at the cost of their identity and their respect for the inner and outer woman.
Reconciliation with the Anima
Jung’s theory of the anima – “the feminine subpersonality of a male person”, is part
of his concept of contrasexuality – “that everyone has a biologically based opposite-
sexed personality derived from genetic traces of the other sex” (Cambridge
Companion to Jung 224). Jung’s concept of contrasexuality suggests “the potential
of each sex to develop the qualities and aspects of its opposite … through the
process of individuation,” allowing each sex to “integrate its opposite at a time in life
when reflection and personal creativity might be enhanced” (228). As noted by
Wehr, Lauter and Rupprecht, however, Jung’s concept of the contrasexual archetypes
the anima and the animus – which “became an essential feature of his description of
the differences between men and women” (Wehr 8) and are pivotal to my reading of
Androgyny in Jung and Le Guin’s work – are not equally defensible. While Jung
would have presumably formulated the concept of the anima from his own dream-
life, his explanation of the concept of the animus (CW 9:II, par. 27) is
“uncharacteristically deductive and conjectural” (Lauter and Rupprecht 8). Since
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Jung’s concept of the animus resulted from speculation, his concept of the anima is
therefore more capable of holding up under scrutiny. Subsequently, in exploring
androgyny using the theories of Jung, it is better to maintain the same perspective,
albeit male, as Jung himself. This may mean that one can only use Jung to read male
characters and their means to androgyny.
Shevek is a thinker whose solitary existence heavily disillusions him. The
demoralizing impact of Sabul’s refusal to publish his work makes Shevek vulnerable
to his long-absent mother who tempts him with a Faustian bargain. Jung recognized
this meeting of negative archetypes as a complex-forming phenomenon:
As the male hero moves from the realm of the personal unconscious
down into the collective unconscious, the shadow changes sex,
merging alarmingly with his buried feminine self. The shadow and
anima together form a powerful ‘autonomous complex’ with Jung
calls the ‘dual mother’ or ‘terrible mother’. (Lauter and Rupprecht
102)
Rulag tempts Shevek to join the group that has learned to deal with people like Sabul
by playing with them (104). She also offers the security and guidance of the mother-
child bond. As Shevek’s mother, she was “the bearer of the first anima image” for
him (Rowland 34). Shevek refuses to join her yet his confrontation and subsequent
victory over his ‘terrible mother’ comes at a terrible emotional cost, and his decision
will haunt him. As much as he attempts to rebel against her, he remains her legacy
(132 and 147).
After leaving the hospital, Shevek attempts to reconnect with the social organism.
As he describes to Takver, his life has been a “‘trackless, feckless, fuckless waste
strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers’” (150). His observation is a textbook
example of Jung’s theory that “the person for whom thinking was the dominant
function would eventually want to experience feeling and integrate that function into
the personality” (Lauter and Rupprecht 5).
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However, something is missing. Between his encounter with Rulag and Takver,
Shevek attempts to reunite with humanity yet finally concedes that such an
enterprise, for him, is doomed. This suggests that a willingness to change, to “do
right” (130), is not sufficient. Rather, while we can decline possession by a malefic
anima, it is only by bonding with our “benevolent anima” (Man and his Symbols
188) that we can move on as much fuller people.
The refusal to join Rulag allows Shevek to hear Bedap, the herald of his
adventure, who arrives into his life briefly after his encounter with Rulag. Primed
and receptive to change, he eventually encounters Takver, drawn to him many years
ago by his eulogy for romantic love in a hedonistic society. Their conversation, four
days into their hike together, suggests he has come to an appreciation of the limits of
analysis and is attempting to balance Eros - the “principle of likeness and
relatedness” (Rowland 15; see also Cambridge Companion to Jung 316)) - with
Logos (Lauter and Supprecht 6). This suggests that he is ready for a reconciliation
with his benevolent anima, and so Shevek and Takver make their bond (149), and
Shevek is reborn (Lauter and Rupprecht 102). Read allegorically, Takver is Shevek’s
benevolent anima. Campbell and Rowland (228) refer to the forming of such a
union between Ego and Unconscious, or Same with Other, as the ‘Sacred Marriage’,
while Jung would describe the bond that Shevek and Takver form as the conunctio
where “male and female, conjoined … symbolize the birth of the new self” (Wehr
103). Shevek’s ‘discovery’ of Takver is the culmination of his coming to terms
with humanity, and signifies discovery of his Eros. He has come to believe that he
is, contrast to what he tells Gimar during the forestation project (44), a human being.
Shevek’s bond with Takver (152) allows him to become a father as well as
complete his life’s work (231), and this is consistent with Emma Jung’s description
of the anima (Emma Jung 46). Takver is in this regards Shevek’s Muse – the
unaccredited second author of his mathematical formulae. The sacred marriage also
allows him to extract the most valuable qualities of his time spent under Sabul’s
shadow: “The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be
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groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid” (156).
The growing pressure of conformity, and the centralizing of power that Bedap has
witnessed on Anarres, gain a human face when Rulag returns to the scene as an
antagonist of the Syndicate of Initiative in the PDC meeting (291), and attempts to
intimidate Shevek into submission to the idea that “majority rule and might makes
right” (296). Having overcome sufficient obstacles, Shevek’s “‘feminine element’ no
longer appears … as a dragon, but as a woman” (Man and His Symbols 119).
Campbell associates the dragon with “Holdfast … the generation immediately
preceding that of the savior of the world” (Hero 352). Rulag is both Shevek’s would-
be matriarch and the maintainer of the status quo. Shevek ‘slays’ Rulag by telling
her that “‘No one who will not go as far as I’m willing to go has any right to stop me
from going’” (296), and then by travelling to Urras.
In challenging Rulag’s authority over the Syndicate of Initiative, as well as over his
own spirit, Shevek avoids possession by his malefic anima. He remains, as it were,
‘Dispossessed’. Instead, he attains unio mentalis – ‘the soul and the spirit are uniting’
(CW 14 par. 756). Considering that ‘anima’ means ‘soul’, and ‘animus’ means
‘spirit’, his Dragon Slaying suggests that his ego’s relationship with its anima is now
cemented, and Shevek has thus attained androgyny.
Card’s sequel to Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, highlights the importance of
reconciliation with the anima. Here begins the enduring theme of the Quartet: our
ability to share the universe. It is Ender’s life, after having inadvertently caused the
xenocide of the alien race by the human fleet he led, which tests his ability to
encourage others to coexist. His ‘Live and let live’ attitude, Jung would argue, is
attributable to his anima – represented, in the Quartet, by Valentine. It is
interesting to note that Valentine accompanies Ender in the settlement of the first
extra-Solar planet, leaving Peter who dies of old age during his sibling’s inter-stellar
journey during which, due to time dilation, they age but a few weeks. A Jungian
reading of Ender’s journey is that though he is able to reconcile his Shadow, the
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challenge of his life will be to reconcile his anima.
Jung’s theories appear highly dedicated to the idea of an androgyny as a milestone
of individuation. In the process of reconciliation with various archetypal figures,
as demonstrated by Shevek in The Dispossessed, the hero should, for example –
regardless of their gender - assimilate their Shadow (a gender-neutral figure), their
anima (their feminine qualities) if they are a male, and their animas (their masculine
qualities) if they are a female. The Jungian hero strives for balance in their self-
gendering. On the face of it, heroism is, within the Jungian framework, accessible
for both men and women through an effectively identical course. Jung’s theories
factored in gender only so far as to counter societal-driven gendering, as he argued
that “the body intervenes in, but does not govern or determine, psychic identity”
(Rowland 36).
“Psychic identity” can be as powerful a collective force against the attainment of
Androgyny as the body. In The Dispossessed, political development during the
Anarres chapters of the novel suggests a movement away from moderate Eros to
extreme Logos – a movement with strong parallels to a move from sexual equality to
phallocentricism. Shevek, for instance, describes Anarresti society to the Urrasti
socialists as having lost its idealism (114). We also see the personal consequences of
this transition in the portrayal of Tirin, after he has been ostracized (270). Tirin’s
description shares strong parallels with Wehr’s portrayal of women as experiencing a
“‘death of the soul’ rather than physical death” because of their internalization of
society’s patriarchal view of them (17).
The cultural shift that takes place in Anarres suggests that within even a society that
has transcended androcentricism and whose members select characteristics
regardless of their sex, there remains the danger of masculine or feminine traits
being privileged over the other. Anarrasti society does not specifically target men or
women. Rather, those who hold a tendency towards either Eros or Logos counter to
their peers (such as Tirin and Shevek who clearly demonstrate Eros through their
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high valuation of connectedness) come under attack. On Anarres it is as if sexism
has transcended sex. Perhaps ‘genderism’ would be a more appropriate term in its
place.
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Chapter 3: The Hero and their Community
Chapter 2 – The hero and Androgyny – suggested a method by which individuals
could adopt characteristics of their opposing gender regardless of societal gender
notions. With similar Feminist sentiments, Chapter 3 – The Hero and their
Community – suggests a path that individuals can take in their own journey where
they value self- awareness over brute force. It is a journey where each experience
compounds, rather than revamps, their knowledge base, where they can be
reassured that their self- development benefits their peers as well as themselves, and
where their biological and symbolic parents and children are valuable contributors to
their lives.
Non-Linear models of time and the Journey feature prominently in critical feminist
work such as Jay Griffith’s Pip Pip, and Le Guin’s Earthsea where Ged’s journey
is constructed “in the form of a long spiral” (Language of the Night 51; see also
Bittner 61). Campbell’s circular model of the adventure (Hero 245) has been adapted
by Pearson and Pope in their construction of a key to the female hero’s journey.
The circle has also immense significance for Jung. According to Jung the mandala, or
circle, represents the Self: Jung refers to the mandala as the “archetype of wholeness”
(CW 9:I par. 715) and “the psychological expression of the totality of the self (par.
542). The object of the mandala is
the self in contradistinction to the ego, which is only the point of
reference for consciousness, whereas the self comprises the totality
of the psyche altogether, i.e. conscious and unconscious. (par. 717)
Jung also writes in his memoirs
The mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the
path to the centre, to individuation.
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… Between 1918 and 1920, I began to understand that the goal of
psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there
is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at
most, only at the beginning … (Memories, Dream and Reflections 222)
The shape of the mandala and Campbell’s key tacitly suggests that it is through a
complete circumnavigation of the self that we can attain the Self. Yet sufficient
differences exist between Jung and Campbell (Joseph Campbell) suggests that
Campbell has misread or misrepresented Jung at numerous points in his
development of a model for the hero’s journey. This chapter highlights how
Shevek’s journey is more in accord with Jung’s model of individuation than
Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey. This chapter will also attempt to show that
Le Guin’s representation the hero’s journey challenges Campbell’s model of
individuation. This chapter also formulates an adaptation of Campbell’s Key to the
hero’s journey that adequately represent the structure and themes of The
Dispossessed and related stories.
Vision and Truth
It is important to note that Shevek sees Takver a number of times at Abbenay
before engaging with her. This most poignantly occurs after his confrontation with
Sabul.
He thought about the Northsetting Institute and the party the night
before he left. It seemed very long ago now, and so childishly
peaceful and secure that he could have wept in nostalgia. As he
passed under the porch of the Life Sciences building a girl passing
looked sidelong at him, and he thought that she looked like that girl,
what was her name, the one with short hair, who had eaten so
many fried cakes the night of the party. He stopped and turned, but
the girl was gone … (99-100)
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Clearly, Shevek requires the correct ‘vision’ to be able to appreciate his benevolent
anima. It is the growing of the third eye, marked in the case of Shevek by his
encounter with Takver at the beginning of the hike into the mountains, which is the
greater boon of the hero. For while traditional heroes such as those generally
portrayed by Campbell in Hero appear concerned with gaining power to magnify
their actions, authors of feminist models of the hero create characters who gain
insight into the use of power they already possess. Rather than bigger muscles,
Pearson and Pope concur; the hero – female or male – should strive for a
broadening of their mind.
An exploration of the heroic journeys of women – and of men who are
relatively powerless because of class or race – makes clear that the
archetypal hero masters the world by understanding it, not by
dominating, controlling, or owning the world or other people.
Even works about privileged male heroes, especially works in the
romantic or transcendental tradition, frequently express ambivalence
about the macho ideal of heroism … Ishmael (In Herman Melville’s
Moby Dick) observes [Ahab’s] arrogant and destructive behaviour and
learns from it, and his triumph ultimately comes not through
attempting to control the world, but through understanding himself to
be part of its natural processes. (4-5)
While male hero journeys are concerned with gaining strength through communion
with an omnipotent god, female hero journeys are often about communion with an
omniscient god. Through spontaneous ceremony and self-initiation rather than a
“heroic endeavour”, we can achieve greater understanding of the ego and self-
knowledge (Shorter 12). Gaining the third eye also allows us to meet the eyes of the
other.
[Takver] had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in
her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the
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experience of existence outside the human boundary. Takver would
have known how to look back at that eye in the darkness under the
trees. (22)
Other characters who have balanced their gendered-characteristics also appear to
have a significant respect, like Shevek (Rochelle 44), for truth. In A Long way from
Verona, Jessica Vye is adamant about standing by her portrayal of her tea party,
which a teacher accuses her of manufacturing. In Mononoke-Hime, Ashitaka – a
young champion with a strong sense of justice – makes it clear to Eboshi Gozen that
he will “see with eyes unclouded”.
In Woolf’s Orlando, three metaphysical figures, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty, visit
the sleeping protagonist. However, trumpets blare forth “‘The Truth and Nothing but
the Truth’”, forcing the grieving personified virtues to retreat (86-7). This scene can
be read that Orlando, who upon the cusp of waking up as a woman, is offered the
choice of adopting the conventional attributes of a woman – or, to remain faithful to
who he is regardless of sex, and continue being a poet: slayer of illusions. Both
Woolf’s Orlando (112) and Le Guin’s Shevek share a respect for the truth, for
fidelity to their feelings, fidelity to their ideals, and a sense of a great-untold truth.
Upon Orlando’s marriage, she becomes conscious that it is no longer ‘proper’ for
her to be a poet – “If one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to
write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.” (173). Yet Orlando propels
herself forward into writing - or ‘truth telling’ – and this becomes the antidote to
the social expectation that she be a ‘properly’ married woman. This is similar to
Shevek trying to find harmony between his writing and his relationship with Takver:
“Although [Takver’s] existence was necessary to Shevek her actual presence could
be a distraction.” (156)
Shevek also demonstrates the feminist privileging of perception over power
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through his process of overcoming Pae, his Shadow – rather than “picking
something up and throwing it after Pae” (228) after finding that he has been
restricted to the University grounds, Shevek considers what he can best extract from
Pae.
Of the above texts mentioned, Orlando specifically suggests a strong correlation
between Androgyny and fidelity to the truth. An individual who has attained psychic
androgyny needs to have lost the sense of shame that would otherwise allow
socially prescribed notions of gender to influence their self-perception. Instead, they
need to value above all things their own perception – to recognize that the emperor
has no clothes on and, perhaps, that he is in fact a woman.
Ego and the Unconscious
While the majority of those on Anarres share strong similarities to a Campbellian
model of the journey – finite and closed – Shevek appears comparable to the Jungian
model of individuation, asserting and developing his own ego rather than allowing
his ego to “abandon itself to the unconscious.” The advantage of the ego is its
mobility – the ego is “the subject of consciousness … It is the ego that leaves behind
the world of everyday consciousness and discovers the new world of the
unconscious” (Segal 19). It is his strong ego that allows Shevek to travel from
Anarres to Urras, and back again – symbolically, to rise and fall through strata of
consciousness, to be master of the two worlds and have “freedom to pass back and
forth across the world division” (Hero 229). The strength of Shevek’s ego also drives
his journey to individuation, on Anarres as well as Urras, causing him to live
nomadically, dwelling only briefly at any one place or with any one group.
While for Campbell, the “effective annihilation of the human ego was accomplished
and society achieved a cohesive organization” (390)
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The Jungian ideal is the establishment of a balance between the ego
and the unconscious: just as the ego should not sever its ties to the
unconscious, so it should not abandon itself to the unconscious. The
ego gets supplemented, not replaced, by the self. Indeed, the ego
remains the center of consciousness. (Segal 19-20)
The Self – the “totality of the psyche” (Cambridge Companion to Jung 318) – makes
up for a deficiency in the ego. In the process of attaining selfhood then, the ego
compounds rather than revamps. Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness expresses
this sentiment in the context of truth.
‘I have seen a picture,’ Havzhiva went on. ‘Lines and colors made
with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is
local, all truth is partial … No truth can make another truth untrue. All
knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color.
Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing
the part as the whole.’ (160)
Havzhiva is referring to truth, using the analogy of a mandala that he has seen, to a
tribal elder – the Chosen - who fears that the move towards equality across the sexes
will mean the end of all their tradition and cultural identity. Havzhiva grew up in
an isolated, highly spiritual community only to find that beyond the lands of his
town existed the cities of an intergalactic civilization whose ancestral roots he
shared. Therefore, his reassurance to the Chosen is from the heart – the future will
not negate the past but rather supplement it. In reference to Havzhiva’s approach to
reconciling his personal experiences, parallels can thus be drawn between Jung’s
attitude towards the endurance of the ego, and Le Guin’s development of her hero
protagonists, be it Havzhiva or Shevek. The hero’s epiphanies on their path of self-
discovery and self- development do not negate but rather enhance their prior self.
Jung’s respect for the continuity of the ego, as demonstrated above, should reassure
Wehr that Jung’s path of individuation does not endanger women whose egos are
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already underdeveloped because of patriarchal intimidation, and “are tacitly and
explicitly discouraged from gratifying their own needs or seeking fulfilment of their
own desires.” (100-1)
Shevek’s symbolic deaths are an effective method of simulating the experience of
ego- annihilation, and subsequently personal growth, without an actual surrendering
of the ego. Living and dying through his admirable peers proves to be an effective
means for Shevek to develop himself. In watching the people he cares for die or
suffer, he is, in Jungian terms, watching the sacrifice of his “hero ideal”:
If a man has a good brain, thinking becomes his hero and, instead
of Christ, Kang, or Berson, becomes his ideal. If you give up his
thinking, this hero ideal, you commit a secret murder – that is, you
give up your superior function. (Jung Analytical Psychology 48)
Jung explains that the sacrifice of the hero ideal is necessary
In order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected
with the sacrifice of the superior functions in order to get at the
libido necessary to activate the inferior functions (48).
Each death that takes place in The Dispossessed causes Shevek immense suffering,
yet each leads to an awakening and retrospection - as Shevek explains to Takver,
“‘The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.’” (158) In
these symbolic deaths that mark the achievement of his maturity (Man and His
Symbols 123), he is able to reflect upon and judge the earlier stages of his life, such
as Gvarab’s memorial service when he criticizes himself for the three years he’s
‘wasted’ at Abbenay (135). At each death, there is a rebirth, both in Shevek and
through Shevek - considering that the recounting of the air accident during the
forestation project and his deduction that suffering is inevitable deeply influence
Takver and Bedap (54).
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The most significant and visible symbolic death that takes place in the novel occurs
during the early stages of the forestation project. Shevek is frustrated that
mindless labour claims the time that otherwise could be occupied by intellectual
work. Yet in the forestation project, he is able to engage his physical self: building
up his strength, connecting with rage, understanding the nature of suffering and
rejection, as well as becoming well versed in sex, are all the benefits that develop
from ceasing to waste “his brain on code-messages and his semen on wet dreams”
(49). His “inferior functions” proceed to serve him well later by helping him avoid
being the subject of Takver’s contempt (154). Moreover, it is by moving away from
his overly intellectual (48) childhood friends, and connecting with a woman and his
planet, that he is able to start to coherently form an idea of what he wants to research
and study.
The ‘murder’ of Shevek’s higher-functions resumes however when Takver and he
split up during the drought: the expectation at Elbow is that he will not stop to think
what it means to be fed while another is not, and to ignore those dying around him.
His sense of compassion is being “murdered” by his community (Analytical
Psychology 48). While he tolerated the earlier death of his heroic ideal because of
“how proud you felt of what you got done this way, all together – what satisfaction it
gave” (43-4), he walks away from Elbow because he is being asked to give up too
much in return for too little. This point marks the beginning of his attempts to break
free of the unconscious.
The Anarresti, by refusing to return, indicate that they have surrendered to the
unconscious - in this case, the collective unconscious often demonstrated during the
Anarresti chapters. Maedda, a young woman in Old Town on Urras, shows that
Anarres is the site of the dissolution of the ego: “Do you know that when people
here want to wish each other luck they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’”
(243). Too often, Maedda’s perception is an accurate reflection - the Anarresti,
having been “absorbed” into the group mind – the collective unconscious - do not
think for themselves. Segal notes the appeal of dissolution.
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The strongest temptation is the prospect of returning to one’s original
state: the state of absorption in the cosmos … The temptation is to
surrender oneself to it and thereby to lose the responsibility entailed
by individuality. (19)
Shevek’s first trip into space illustrates this temptation, where death becomes
synonymous with dissolution.
He was clearly aware of only one thing, his own total isolation. The
world had fallen out from under him, and he was left alone.
He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had
ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He
had kept himself, and lost the rest. (9)
Shevek describes the Anarresi as sons born in exile, (76) denoting that their
collective journey is incomplete. If Shevek were to fail to acknowledge his roots
and return to Urras, and then back again to Anarres, it “would mean [his] utter
failure, not his success: it would mean his failure to break free of the unconscious.”
(Segal 21)
The Community
As impressive as the parallels between Campbell’s key and the mandala are,
however, it is difficult and indeed impractical to consider the hero in isolation from
their community. Shevek’s journey, as Rochelle notes, embodies many other people.
Shevek … is on a Quest like the traditional Monomyth heroes. But he
is seeking a double grail, which intertwines the personal and the
public, the scientific and the social. (44)
Shevek’s journey is a cultural event. He redeems his world, as Campbell would
explain, by virtue of being a hero yet he also actively participates in his society’s
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mythology by playing the Prison Guard, the Beggarman, and finally enabling
Ketho to play the Capitalist. Firstly, this highlights that Shevek is continuing
Tirin’s work, which emphasizes the hero as role. It is at Elbow that Shevek takes the
torch from Tirin (269), because Tirin himself is no longer capable of carrying it.
Shevek leaves his post and reunites with Takver not only out of refusal to write lists
of who was fed and who did not – he leaves because he sees how the social organism
had destroyed his childhood friend. By taking the torch from Tirin and travelling to
Urras, Shevek is myth building – adopting the figure of the Beggarman and, like a
contemporary actor with an ancient script, re-interpreting that figure and recasting the
mold.
The symbolic and vicarious deaths experienced by the hero, illustrate that Shevek is
living through his community, taking their deaths personally – the same blood that
runs through his ammari runs through him. Shevek is also an expression of his
community. Though he travels solo, his journey is a collective project with the
community travelling inside him. While on Urras, for instance, Shevek thinks of
Rulag, Sabul, and Takver in terms of their virtues and vices. He wishes he had the
empathy of Takver when he sees the horse; looking into a mirror, he realizes how
much he looks like Rulag when he puts on a suit; he acknowledges that his socially
encouraged single- mindedness at the A-Io University is reminiscent of Sabul; and
he sees that Oiie’s interaction with his children and wife is almost identical to
Shevek’s interaction with his own children (123). Reading this allegorically, these
cases collectively suggest that Shevek carries with him the archetypal figures – read
literally, they suggest that Shevek is carrying the essence of his community within
him. Shevek’s reconciliation and assimilation of the Beggarman, and the anima and
shadow archetypes also indicates the hero’s ability to draw from the collective
unconscious – the wellspring of his people’s culture.
Shevek may be eternally egotistical, thinking always of the right of the individual to
self-determination (295), and travels to Urras in order to do the work that he cannot
do while on Anarras, yet his journey, driven by self-interest, helps cross-pollinate the
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two planets. Thus, he facilitates both his personal growth and the growth of his
community. In contrast to Campbell’s closing words in Hero with a Thousand
Faces, it is society that guides and saves our creative hero Shevek - the last
glimpse we have of Shevek is not of him experiencing the “silences of his personal
despair” (391) but celebrating his imminent return to Anarres as a whole being
(319). Rather than carrying “the cross of the redeemer” (Hero 391), Shevek’s hands
are empty, “as they had always been” (319).
Passing the Torch
After concluding his quest, Campbell’s hero appears obliged to slay his father
(Hero 349), contradicting the necessary stage of Atonement with the Father (130).
Campbell fails also to provide a reason for having faith in a father who could just as
easily be a Bluebeard (Estes 43) as compassionate guardian, just as easily a Sabul as
a Palat, and just as easily a product of Urras as Anarres.
Campbell’s argument can teach us that the hero must be constantly constructive or
else become destructive (Hero 338n.21) when insufficiently engaged. What sets the
lasting hero apart from the demon is the practice of creativity. The hero can ensure
that they do not succumb to stasis, entropy, and decay (see Sullivan), which are
sustainable only through cannibalism (Hero 337), by taking on a student to guide and
not possess.
Not only does the child need a mentor as a role model of the virtues
that he or she hopes to activate from the unconscious, but the adult
also benefits from the nurturing relationship that allows him or her to
get in touch with promptings of the unconscious. [Through the
mentorship] Children may cultivate their underdeveloped faculties of
introversion, sensation, and, thinking, while adults may discover their
latent potential for extraversion, intuition, and feeling. (Byrnes 43-56)
This occurs with Shevek’s relationship with Ketho: upon his journey on the Terran
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star ship to Anarres, the story no longer concerns Shevek. He is a ‘Senex’ – “a person
of any age who is at the end of a developmental process” (Levinson 211). His journey
has finished, and another’s is yet to begin: that person is Ketho, Shevek’s new
apprentice, or ‘Peur’ - “a person of any age who is at the start of a developmental
process” (211). Ketho’s fate is to try Anarchy out for himself and so he descends into
the ‘underworld’ of Anarres, turning Shevek’s world of innocence into the world of
experience. Shevek, as a mentor-figure, appears in Ketho’s life “where insight,
understanding, good advice, determination, planning etc. are needed but cannot be
mustered on [his] own resources” (Jung Archetype 216). While Ketho will take
Shevek down to Abbenay Space Port in the landing craft (315), Shevek will
become his guide the moment that Ketho steps onto Anarres.
A culture that values a system of mentoring, by ranking spirit guide figures higher
than heroism, encourages individuals to adopt an apprentice and become teachers
(Rochelle 109) and helps avoid the appearance of the nemesis: the ‘fully grown’ hero
(Richie).
If the protagonist’s journey is structured, as Le Guin does, so that they become spirit
guides instead of an Ogre, a vicious cycle of successors to would-be Ogres slaying
their infanticidal fathers may be broken. Just as Shevek is mentored, albeit briefly,
by his father, Palat, who introduces to him the logarithm tables (30) so too does
Shevek act as mentor and guide to Ketho, the Hainishman, to Anarres and its
culture. Palat provides the first step to Shevek’s quest to break through barriers, to
reconnect with his past - while Shevek provides for Ketho and the whole of the
Hainish league the chance for a future (287). This need is highlighted by Le Guin’s
inversion of Byrnes’ stereotype of the introverted elder and extraverted youth in the
mentorship of the forty-year old Shevek and the thirty year-old (315) Ketho: Shevek
laughs, while it is Ketho, indicative of his race the Hainish, who is “old before their
time” (Byrnes 48).
Yet just as Shevek passes the torch to Ketho, so too does Shevek receive the torch
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from Odo, the philosophical founder of Anarres, who becomes the focus of Le
Guin’s prequel to The Dispossessed in the short story ‘The Day before the
Revolution’. Shevek is the word of Odo made flesh (244), and his presence on
Anarres can be said to represent Odo’s metaphysical journey to the moon. Yet he is
also Odo’s ‘son’, born in exile, yet opting to make a kind of return – and so his
journey to Urras completes Odo’s journey.
An additional journey is available for inclusion considering that Odo did more than
simply initiate the Odonian movement which is realized through the settlement on
Anarres, but lived her own life parallel to the discontents in Omelas. It is also
necessary to recognize the sacrifices Odo makes: her period in prison where she
produces the work that subsequently becomes the elixir of her followers, the loss of
her husband, and her stroke (Le Guin Winds Twelve Quarters 301).
The Spiral-Shaped Journey
The proposed model for the hero’s journey that follows embodies the idea that the
community’s heroism is a single strand that runs through the ages, yet made up of
individuals attaining Selfhood. This key, shaped like a spiral, portrays heroism as a
role adopted by individuals of each generation, with each individual’s journey being
both a continuation of their community’s previous hero, and a prelude to the
subsequent hero. The spiral key is open, outward looking, and suggests an
interdependent relationship between the generations of heroes. Odo and Ketho are
important in including in a representation of Shevek’s journey as they reflect the
important role that the inter-generational, and even interplanetary and interstellar
community plays in enabling Shevek’s self-realization. Including Ketho also
highlights the important role that accepting apprentices plays in offering an
alternative to Campbell’s argument that heroes are required to usurp their father’s
throne, and in time to be usurped themselves by their heir.
The presence of Odo and Ketho as participants in the same narrative as Shevek,
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however, raises issues regarding subject-position – from whose position is the story
to be told when one person’s underworld is another person’s home? (This is an
important consideration in The Teachings of Don Juan, which highlights the lack of
distinction made by a Native American shaman, between consensual reality and the
supernatural realm, or Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, where the
indigenous people of an exploited planet do not privilege waking over dreaming.)
Because of Tirin’s observation on the hill that “‘Our earth is their Moon; our Moon
is their earth’” (37), and the challenge to view Shevek’s life on the planet of Anarres
as Odo living on her planet’s ‘moon’, both Shevek and Ketho’s journeys could be
said to take place in their respective ‘underworlds’. Consequently, Campbell’s
horizontal line strictly delineating the ‘threshold of adventure’ is redundant. The
spiral key will include a marking of the times in the individual’s life spent
immersed in the unconscious realm, or within the unconscious, yet since Jung, unlike
Freud, refused to privilege the ego over the unconscious, the location of the hero’s
journey into the underworld will not be specifically located in the underside of the
spiral.
Lack of closure is a narrative feature of The Dispossessed as well as a thematic
feature, with Shevek’s emphases that the revolution must have no end, lest it never
have started (185). Presence of arrows at head and tail of the spiral, suggesting
infinite extension in either direction, draws attention to this open-endedness.
It is tempting to set up players in a discourse as binaries - for example Freud versus
Jung in Psychology, or Campbell versus Pearson and Pope in Comparative
Mythology. Yet it is by no means reasonable to separate the intertwined histories of
the above critics. Just as Jung rebelled against Freud, Pearson and Pope rebelled
against Campbell, and the remnants of the predecessors’ legacy live on in the
reactionary results of the rebellion.
To argue that Jung and Campbell are at opposite ends of the spectrum in regards to
portrayals of the ego’s journey towards Self is appealing yet faulty. Instead,
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Campbell has created a dual-product of Jung and Freud’s schools of Psychology.
Likewise, though it would be satisfying to proclaim that Pearson and Pope’s hero
has ‘matured’ to fit in to the twenty-first century, the truth appears to resemble more
that Pearson and Pope have created a model of the female hero that accommodates
the narratives of female characters and to balance out Campbell’s phallocentric
model of the hero. The structure of the hero’s journey remains circular – only the
hero’s gender has changed to protect the critics who fear to venture into a territory of
androgynies.
Reconciliation with the Persona
In The Dispossessed, there are three noteworthy attempts by Shevek and his peers
while on Anarres to reconnect publicly with their cultural and archetypal roots. In
Jungian terms, this takes place through the deliberate, calculated, and temporary
assumption of a persona, or public mask. The first is when Shevek and his friends
enter the mindset of a prison guard with Tirin and Givesh when they lock up Kadagv
(31-7), and then Shevek insists that they release him not out of respect for Kadagv
but out of respect for himself. This experience informs the rest of Shevek’s life,
explaining his phobia of locked doors, and his desire to pull down the invisible walls
separating people and races. The second is when Tirin dresses up as the Beggarman
at Shevek’s farewell party, crying “‘Bay me, bay me for just a little money …’” (51).
The third is when Tirin goes on to extend his stage skills in isolation, producing a
satirical play about a capitalist coming to Anarres. (269)
Shevek personally and consciously rejects imprisonment and scapegoating for
himself by playing the prison guard. In Jungian terms, Shevek’s actions could be read
as reviving latent archetypes in order to discard them. He sees his culture’s past,
acknowledges it, and turns away, never needing to return; when given the
opportunity to go to the decommissioned prison that held Odo on Urras, he
declines, knowing “what a prison cell was like.” (75)
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Tirin is, by contrast, adventurous in his experimentation of theatre, and unlike
Shevek, makes his findings (as he plays on the edge of Anarresti culture) public:
writing and performing the play of a capitalist coming to Anarres. This play actively
and verbally satirizes the Anarresian fear of invasion – a fear that remains unvoiced
in the novel except by those who wish to play on racism, such as Rulag. Tirin’s play
mocks the notion that Abbenay could be effectively invaded and Odonian society
undermined. As Bedap comments in the PDC meeting, having an open door policy
with Urras says to the Urrasti and to themselves that they are strong enough to face
the capitalists as equals (293). Yet Tirin’s attempt to reinforce his peers’ sense of
community strength and integrity comes is received as an insult and he is
subsequently ostracized.
This suggests that as well as myth being a medium for a culture to express its
repressed nature (Knapp 7) and for that repressed nature to be resurrected, it is also
an opportunity to reconcile with our shadow, to name our dark side, our forgotten
or misinterpreted history, and our fears. Moreover, having named our Shadow we
can subsequently control it. Shevek has the fail-safe within him since the prison-
guard play-acting, that will prevent him from ever tolerating luxury and comfort at
the expense of another, while Tirin’s play begins to bring down walls, reassuring the
Anarresi that they need not fear their home planet.
Yet the practice of persona-assumption by Shevek takes on a more serious tone, and
the stakes become bigger, during his time on Urras. While as a child on Anarres
Shevek is trying to fit in with the demands of society, on Urras he is using play as a
“means of assimilating the world, making sense of their experience in order to
make it part of [himself]” (McMahon 2). In going to Urras, Shevek re-enacts Tirin’s
play-acting of the “Poor Urrasti, the Beggarman” (51). Shevek appears to be
attempting to recapture the fun and playfulness of youth but not relating completely
to his own youth. Instead, he is trying to resurrect the Tirin that he knew when they
were both nineteen years of age. The level of energy that both Tirin and Shevek
possessed in their late teens is in sharp contrast to their state preceding Shevek’s
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departure to Abbenay – Tirin is broken by the reaction to his play (270), and Shevek
(301) is working towards regaining the level of independence he possessed as an 18
year old – “Uninfluenced by others” (51). He is pretending to be Tirin pretending to
be an Urrasi.
By calling himself the Beggarman, Shevek is able to think as an Urrasi. Shevek
experiments: he tries meat; he tries alcohol; he tries shopping; he tries being a tourist;
and he tries to initiate an affair. Each attempt fails but it is in this play-acting, this
attempt at empathy, that he comes closer to both his racial Shadow and his personal
Shadow. While on Urras, Shevek begins to adopt the characteristics of the
negative figures on Anarres – for instance, while studying furiously in his room at
the University “It occurred to him that he was getting to be like Sabul … possessive
and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behaviour on Urras” (229).
And -
He scowled at the touch, straightened up, and turned away from the
mirror; but not before he had been forced to see that, thus clothed,
his resemblance to his mother, Rulag, was stronger than ever (111).
Shevek accumulates money, clothes for himself, chocolates for Vea, colour
photographs for Pilun (173), and the scraps of paper with theory written on them.
Each experiment concludes with a reflection on the value of each of the ‘exercises’:
he takes what he can from the experience, and rejects the rest.
Having played the Beggarman, he tacitly repeats Tirin’s words – “‘Bay me! Bay
me!’” (51) - And he is bought. An aspect of his ‘play therapy’ on Urras is
pretending that he “both imagines and practices being in control” (McMahon 2),
which he eventually learns is not the case – “They owned him. He had thought to
bargain with them, a very naïve notion” (225). Yet it is an illusion that serves its
purpose, allowing him to leisurely experiment with being an A-Iotian. The
University in A-Io becomes a ‘playground’ provided to him by the parent-like
government to “protect (him) from intrusions from the outside world” (McMahon
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2). When Shevek realizes that the game he is playing is a deadly political one, he is
able to break out of the playground.
In addition, just as he earlier accumulates objects, he begins surrendering them.
When he escapes from his room and the University by taxi, he leaves all the
clothes except those he is wearing. He runs into a drunken beggar and gives him all
the money he has. We can assume that he gives the scraps of paper to Keng to
transmit to all of the Ekumen, and on the Terran space ship on the way to Anarres
he laments that he does not have the photo of the sheep with him (319) to give his
daughter. He gradually strips himself until all he has are empty hands. This is in
contrast to Atro who says to Shevek regarding the League of Worlds, “We should
come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands.” (120)
Shevek’s time on Urras, and the fact that he returns to tell his tale challenges the
Anarresi myth of the Beggarman. Shevek proves that Anarresi can travel to Urras
and return as an Anarresi, unconverted. Though the A-Iotian government manages to
own him, this is temporary (225). Unlike the Poor Urrasti of Anarresi mythology that
Tirin plays (51), Shevek does not go to Urras with the intention to sell himself, for
them to ‘bay’ him. When Shevek asks himself, “Having locked himself in jail, how
might he act as a free man?” (225), he is clearly revoking his self-appointed role as
the Beggarman, and has changed back to the more familiar role of the Anarchist.
Tirin’s case, on the other hand, highlights the importance of being able to
distinguish the ego from the persona, in order to avoid persona possession. When an
individual lives out the community’s Shadow, he or she becomes the canvas on which
the community members project their collective dark side – the receiver of
Shadow projection. Tirin falls victim to the temptation to play the victim, or
‘Scapegoat’, and consequently he is sent off into the ‘wilderness’.
Shevek, having shed the mask of the Beggarman, escapes the University. His
subsequent journey to Joking Lane (239) is a trek into history, into aged depths –
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symbolically into A-Io’s aged unconscious: in Old Town, the shops and people are
run- down; the guide to his destination is the owner of a Pawnshop (241) selling used
goods; and the refuge from the riot-police is in a “basement under a used-furniture
store” (245). Shevek here is reminiscent of Euripides’ play The Bacchants, where a
personified Dionysus walks the streets of Thebes, a city whose “anima is unintegrated
[having been] rejected by the ruling conscious order …” (Knapp 6) – the side hidden
from Shevek by his keepers. Yet he himself has been incapable of entering the maze-
like corridors of A- Io’s old capital until now, for the labyrinth represents the
unconscious and only a highly developed individual can make their way through
(Man and His Symbols 118). That Shevek finds the representative of the Syndicates
and Socialist Workers in ‘Joking Lane’ suggests that the Urrasi psyche is still in the
Trickster’s stage, still immature but striving to ascend to some greater level of self
(Man and His Symbols 103; For more information on the Trickster figure, refer to
CW 9:I par. 456-88).
During and after the rally, Shevek is involved in and privy to an internal
dialogue with the mind of the A-Iotian capital. During the rally there is singing
(246); Shevek speaks (247-8); the helicopters come shouting “the meaningless word”
(248); a protestor writes “DOWN” in “broad-smears of blood” (249) – later the
“word was washed off the wall … but it remained; it had been spoken; it had
meaning.” From the basement, hiding from the police, Shevek hears “Soldiers giving
orders to each other” (251). Finally, there is silence – “a silence of death” (253). This
dialogue is between A-Io’s conscious (the ‘owners’) and unconscious (the people of
Old Town). When the unconscious attempts to speak out coherently, a shout silences
it instantly.
Shevek escapes from the capital and seeks refuge in the moat-girt Terran Embassy
(277). Since “Water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious” (Archetype 18),
the crossing of the moat marks the end of Shevek’s journey into his unconscious,
which began when he and Takver made the bond beside the running river (149).
Shevek’s life work is complete and he is free to return home.
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Conclusion
Literary Active Imagination implies an introspective, psychological reading of a
text, where our role is to use the text as a mirror to ourselves, rather than a window
into the author. This suggests a new mode of literary criticism that surrenders any
desire of understanding the mind of the writer, and leaves the literary critic with the
task of using the text to understand themselves.
I encourage an approach to reading that is receptive to characteristics of
protagonists and themes of the text that do not abide by existing conventions such as
those offered by Campbell. In the analysis of how The Dispossessed encourages a
revaluation of the Monomyth, I show that Le Guin’s ‘romance’ of Jungian and
Feminist concepts is able to transcend Campbell. It is my hope that I have presented
a model of the hero’s journey that can accommodate female and male heroes equally,
and inspire men and women to equal degrees.
I also encourage criticism of strongly thematic fictional texts to focus on the schools
of thought that are known to have strongly inspired, or can be seen to strongly
resemble, the ideas pertaining to the author of the fictional text. By showing a school
of thought ‘at work’, we can gain a better understanding of the ideology. A benefit
of a Jungian reading unexplored in these pages is an analysis of the process of
male projection of notions of womanhood and the feminine onto women, as well as
female projections of notions of manhood and the masculine onto men. Yet more
pertinently and outside the Jungian mind-space, is that the notion of projection and
possession provide us with a rewarding inside perspective of how a man, Jung, and
his male and female followers, the Jungians, perceived, explained, and rationalized
gender as patriarchal subjects. Whether Jung’s theories are archaic or not, a
reading of the Jungian or Jung-like features of a novel highlight how his ideas have
permeated modern writing, and have had a lingering influence on views on human
nature.
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Appendix - Synopsis
While it is my hope that my arguments within these pages do not require a thorough
understanding of The Dispossessed, I have provided the below synopsis of Le Guin’s
novel for where my intentions have not translated into reality. For the sake of clarity,
the following synopsis of The Dispossessed will be presented in the chronological
order of Shevek’s life, rather than the actual order of the chapters that alternate
between Shevek’s early life on Anarres with the period he spends on Urras in his later
life. However, the original structure carries immense dramatic importance by
allowing a constant juxtaposition between features of the two societies.
A novel that utilizes a very similar structure to the juxtaposition in The Dispossessed
between Urras and Anarres is Marge Piercy’s 1976 utopian text Woman on the Edge
of Time. This novel follows Connie Ramos’ incarceration at a mental hospital, where
she sporadically blacks out and inadvertently astral-projects herself into the future
amongst the members of a Utopian community. These juxtapositions help highlight
the inadequacies of contemporary forms of helping people find psychic harmony. In
the present, a society that assumes the right to ‘fix’ Connie misdiagnoses her and
locks her up. The people of the future society, however, attaches no stigma to
psychological imbalance – instead, the peers of those who proclaim themselves mad
provide them with the time and support to engage in what appears to be a vision quest
to heal them.
Chapter 2 (25-54)
A baby sits in a nursery cot. The father Palat confers with the matron, explaining
that the mother, Rulag, has accepted a job on Anarres’ capital Abbenay leaving the
child with Palat. As the father and matron watch on, the child refuses to allow
another baby to experience the warm column of light he has found in the centre of
the room – earning him a chastisement from the matron, and he is moved away
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from the warm light. The enraged, propertarian infant subsequently burst into tears.
This is Shevek – our hero.
Four boys, including Shevek, Tirin and Bedap, aged in their mid-teens, seek refuge
from the suffocating presence of women on a hill beside the Northsetting Regional
Institute. Above them floats the sister-planet, Urras.
The night before Shevek is due to depart to Abbenay to further his studies, his
classmates hold a party in his honour. Touched by the number of people who turn
up, there is great merriness, small instances of gluttony, performances, and
reflection. Tirin, Bedap, Shevek, and Takver – now just a woman with a crumb on
her chin – discuss suffering. ‘Brotherhood’ – Shevek argues – ‘Begins in shared
pain.’ ‘Where does it end?’ another asks. However, he cannot answer – yet.
Chapter 4 (78-105)
At the Institute in Abbenay, he finds the truth of the warning from his former
lecturer that his Physics supervisor will try to possess him: Sabul claims credit for
the work that Shevek writes, and censors what he doesn’t like. This leads to a quiet
confrontation where Shevek brings to light the hypocrisy of Sabul. “His (Shevek’s)
gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance he
was indominitable.”
While Shevek wins the battle against Sabul, he departs aware that he has lost the war.
Dismayed, he marches back to his dorm in the rain. He passes Takver, yet she
disappears before he can call out her name. The following day, after a night of
torturous fever, he drags himself to the local clinic to be diagnosed with pneumonia.
There, after recovering, he meets Rulag, the mother, and she gives him a tempting
invitation: to gain, from her, the skills and resources necessary to play against Sabul
in his own game. Yet, fiercely loyal to the memory of his late father, and for himself
– both deserted by Rulag – he declines, and is left to his own sorrow, and loneliness.
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Chapter 6 (129-59)
After rejecting Rulag from his life, and finding his profession dissatisfying, Shevek
attempts to make a connection with others - concerts, work groups, social groups,
academics, the opposite sex. Bedap appears (131) - catalyst to his adventure.
Shevek begins to awaken. Shevek meets Takver on a hike; they fall in love, and
soon move in together.
Chapter 8 (194-223)
The drought is likely to last for several more years. With Takver drawn to the coast
with the child Sadik, Shevek tries to continue his physics research. Against
Shevek’s clear conviction of the value of his work, however, Sabul ejects him from
the institute. Cast adrift, Shevek leaves the city to join the growing effort to help
alleviate the pressures of the drought, unaware of when he will again see his family.
Chapter 10 (254-76)
After running into his childhood friend, Tirin, broken by the social organism and
working as a janitor, Shevek abandons his post and reunites with his family. They
have been apart for four years – yet the bond is as strong as ever.
Soon the drought is over, yet the mood of self-sacrifice remains. Power, which had
slowly centralized on Abbenay and the PDC, has settled there. Shevek, Bedap and
others form the Syndicate of Initiative to publish otherwise censored work, and set up
a radio station with the Urrasi. With growing antagonism directed towards Shevek,
those around him are suffering the fall out – including Sadik, the child. Thus,
Takver and Shevek accept her back into their fold, aware that if those close to
them receive love from them, they must also receive pain through them.
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Chapter 1 (5-24)
To continue his life work, Shevek boards a rocket to Urras, leaving his family
behind. The culture shock is significant. He is the first person from Anarres to land on
Urras in almost two hundred years, and becomes a celebrity. A room, and a job,
awaits him at the Ieu Eun University.
Chapter 3 (55-77)
Shevek is a babe in the woods. Several Urrasti Physicists meet with him, including
Saio Pae, Atro, Chifoilisk, and Oiie, who are more than a little disappointed that he
has no written notes on his theories that they believe will allow instantaneous travel.
He begins a period as a tourist – yet he is lonely, and homesick.
Chapter 5 (106-28)
Shevek begins lecturing and developing his theory. He goes shopping with Pae – an
experience that horrifies Shevek. Chifoilisk – the foreign Physicist and agent to his
government in Thu – approaches Shevek and invites him to return with him to his
homeland. Shevek declines, knowing that as much danger he is in at the University
of being co-opted, it is also where he can do the most good. He learns from Atro
the xenophobia that the Urrasi hold towards the Hainish and Terran off-world
visitors. From dinner with Oiie and his family, he discovers a redeeming quality of
the Urrasi, and a feature that the Anarresi share with them –love of family.
Chapter 7 (160-93)
Shevek receives an enigmatic message from Urrasi dissidents pleading that he
assists their like-minded cause. He meets Oiie’s sister, Vea, and they form a
friendship of sorts. But the bubble is beginning to burst for Shevek – civil war
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breaks out in the nation of Benbili, and the internal-pressure is mounting on Shevek
to take a political stand. Shevek spontaneously leaves the university and travels to the
city, hoping to make contact with the underclass. However, frustrated by his
separation from the proletariat, he resorts to contacting Vea and they spend the day
and evening together. Their conversations are enlightening for both, yet at a party
hosted by Vea things begin to fall apart – Shevek gets drunk, falls into a heated
debate with some of the other guests, misreads Vea’s flirtations as an invitation (with
disastrous consequences), and throws up over the finger food.
Chapter 9 (224-53)
Shevek wakes up with an immense hang over, and deep shame, back at the
University. Pae informs him that with the government’s recent decision to become
involved in the civil war in Benbili means that Shevek’s will be restricted to the
University grounds. Shevek has a brainwave in regards to his theory, and spends the
next few days in a state of intense contemplation, followed by an epiphany that sees
his formula complete. With the help of his manservant, he escapes from the
University and heads to Old Town, where many of the politically active proletariat
is located. He writes articles in protest against the government involvement in the
civil war, and later speaks at a rally. Armed helicopters open fire on the crowd, and
there is a massacre. Shevek escapes, helping a severely wounded protestor. They
find refuge from the riot-police, who are shooting to kill, in a dusty basement. There,
the protestor eventually bleeds to death.
Chapter 11 (277-89)
Wanted by the A-Io government for his part in the workers demonstration, Shevek
finds refuge in the Terran embassy …
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Chapter 13 (313-9)
… And safe passage back to Annaras on the Hainish Interstellar, Davenant. Since
his departure to Urras, the Syndicate of Initiatives has grown – but so too has the
resistance to it. This does not dissuade Ketho, the ship’s second officer, who asks to
accompany Shevek back to the planet of anarchists. Shevek accepts Ketho’s request.
Later that night Shevek stands alone in the Davenant’s gardens, twenty minutes
before he begins his descent back to Annaras. He thinks of Takver, of Saleb, of Pilun
and Bedap, and with empty hands, watches the Cetian sun rise above the ocean.
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