Robertson Davies' novel approach to Jung

Questions opened with a Weasel Scot who said: “D’ye really know anything about this Yoong, or did ye juist mug up eneuch o’ his stuff to write that noavel?” I replied winsomely that I had been reading Jung for 30 years , and that The Manticore had been kindly received in Zurich, where they were in a position to judge.[1]  

“Do you dream much?” asks Dr. Johanna von Haller, a Jungian analyst, in their first session in Zurich. David Staunton, a wealthy Toronto barrister - and functioning alcoholic - has not been much of a dreamer, but he has one from the previous night. In this dream, he left secure and cozy surroundings to travel down back roads where he met a wild Gypsy woman in colorful rags whose whose speech is strange to him. He hurries away and is soon back on familiar ground, speaking from his brief as a barrister in court. Dr von Haller suggests this was an “anticipatory dream” – that the Gypsy was a preview of her, another foreigner whose language is strange to him and from whom he is inclined to flee. “Dreams do not foretell the future,” she observes. “They reveal states of mind in which the future is implicit.” [2] 

 With this exchange, we are in the midst of the liveliest account of the process of a Jungian analysis that I know. It's in The Manticore, the central novel in the Deptford Trilogy by the wordmaster Robertson Davies, one of my favorite novelists. Davies never underwent analysis - which he described in a letter as "barnacle-scraping" [3] - or any formal training in psychology. On the other hand, he had read Jung for thirty years, kept a portrait of Jung on the wall of his study and was a founder of the Analytical Psychology Society of Ontario. He was a depth psychologist in the classical sense of the word, a student of soul. Like his protagonist, he became increasingly attuned to his dreams and his inner life. 

It was a vision from reverie that gave him the image of the manticore and thereby gave the book its title - after he transplanted it into the mind and circumstances of a fictional character. Davies had completed part one of The Manticore when, dozing on his screened porch after lunch, he saw before him a gallery with an ancient picture, showing a beautiful woman in a classical robe, leading a strange beast on a golden chain. "It had the body and head of a lion, the clawed feet of a dragon, a tail which was barbed as the tails of scorpions are barbed in ancient art, and it had the anguished face of a man." Davies consulted an encyclopedia of mythology and identified the beast in his vision as a manticore. [4] 

In the version of the dream that Davies' character tells his analyst, the manticore has his own face and the woman commanding it is Dr Johanna von Haller. When she tells him the name of the beast, he asks, "How can I dream about something I've never heard of?" She responds: "People very often dream of things they don't know...It is because great myths are not invented stories but objectivizations of images and situations that lie very deep in the human spirit." [5] 

 Here we are deep into the Jungian understanding of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, but we have come here effortlessly and fluently, thanks to Robertson Davies' word magic and marvelous ear for dialogue. It must be granted that it is highly unlikely that many therapy sessions - and any patient autobiographies - will manifest the eloquence, wit and lightly-worn erudition of these pages. 

Here is how Dr. von Haller introduces the concept of archetypes: “You might call them the Comedy Company of the Psyche, but that would be flippant and not to do justice to the cruel blows you have had from some of them. In my profession we call them archetypes, which means that they represent and body forth patterns towards which human behavior seems to be disposed, patterns which repeat themselves endlessly, but never precisely in the same way.” [6] Later the analyst declares, "Our great task is to see people as people and not clouded by archetypes we carry about with us, looking for a peg to hang them on...You will recover all these projections which you have visited on other people like a magic lantern projecting a slide on a screen" [7] 

Davies wrote of this novel: "There have been other books which describe Freudian analyses, but I know of no other that describes a Jungian analysis." He added, "I was deeply afraid that I would put my foot in it, for I have never undergone one of those barnacle-scraping experiences, and knew of it only through reading. So I was greatly pleased when some of my Jungian friends in Zurich liked it very much." [8]  

The Zurich crowd were not unanimous, however. When Marie-Louise von Franz, one of the most brilliant of the women around Jung, arrived in Toronto, she was quite frosty to Robertson Davies because she was extremely annoyed by the suggestion that she was the model for Johanna von Haller. Davies had never previously met her, though he had read much of her work and admired her greatly as a classical scholar and interpreter of myth and fairytales, as well an excellent explicator of the Jungian psychology of projection and re-collection. [9] 

After meeting Swiss frost with Canadian froideur on their first evening, Davies charmed von Franz as he played genial host - as Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto - over the days that followed, and von Franz charmed Davies in turn, with her spin on a dream he recounted to her. In the dream, Davies (whose first career was on the London stage) found himself as an actor in a play. His cue has been given, the audience is waiting, but he does not know his lines and doesn't even know what play he is in. Davies told von Franz that he thought the dream expressed his deep sense of inadequacy. She told him robustly: "I would have said it is an indication to you that you don't go on stage to say what other people have written, but to say what you have to say yourself." [10]

References

[1]Robertson Davies to Arnold and Letitia Edinborough February 19, 1980 in For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies edited by Judith Skelton Grant (New York: Viking, 2001)49. [

2] Robertson Davies, The Deptford Trilogy (New York: Penguin, 1990)276. The Manticore was first published in 1972. [3]Robertson Davies to Leon Edel, Thanksgiving (Canadian Style) 1981 in For Your Eye Alone 72.

[4] Judith Skelton Grant, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth (New York: Viking, 1994) 498.

 [5] Deptford Trilogy 404-405. 

[6] Deptford Trilogy 449. 

[7] Deptford Trilogy 450-451. [8] Davies to Leon Edel; For Your Eye Alone 72. 

[9] Von Franz's master work on this theme, Spiegelungen der Seele, had not yet been published, however. The German edition appeared in 1978; Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psyxhology, translated by William H. Kennedy, followed in 1980 (LaSalle and London: Open Court, 1980). 

[10] Grant, Robertson Davies: Man of Myth 498.

A Limbo of Unfulfilled Creative Spirits

Notes from a Reading Life

"You are awakening the little man," the Gypsy queen announces to Simon Darcourt, the professor-priest. He fears she is referring to his neglected male organ but soon we learn that the little man is E.T.A. Hoffmann. The deceased composer and storyteller has been roused from his torpor in a Limbo of unfulfilled creative spirits by a plan to complete his unfinished opera "Arthur of Britain".

I am rereading Robertson Davies' novel The Lyre of Orpheus, the final book in The Cornish Trilogy. It makes me laugh and tremble and shiver with excitement, sometimes in the space of one paragraph.

In the previous novel in the trilogy, What's Bred in the Bone, Davies gave us a daimon reviewing the life dramas of a character he is supervising with the Angel of Biography, the Lesser Zadkiel. They are seated comfortably in the wings as the play goes on. Simon Darcourt, a continuining and simpatico charcater throughout the trilogy, can't eavesdrop on their conversation but intuits how they operate:

“Of course you know what Hesiod calls daimons: spirits of the Golden Age, who act as guardians to mortals. Not tedious manifestations of the moral conscience, like Guardian Angels, always pulling for Sunday-school rightness and goodness. No, manifestations of the artistic conscience, who supply you with extra energy when it is needed, and tip you off when things aren't going as they should. Not wedded to what Christians think of as what is right, but to what is your destiny. Your joker in the pack."

In The Lyre of Orpheus. Robertson scares us with a vision of what happenss to creative spirits that won't give their best work. Here's how the dead Hoffmann describes his current situation:

"I find myself now in Limbo, in that part of it reserved for those artists and musicians and writers who never fully realized themselves, who never quite came to the boil, so to speak. Limbo: not the worst of hereafter, for it is free of the chains of space and time, and permits its denizens a great deal of versatility and, shall I say it, some posthumous influence? Still, not to be too delicate about it, Limbo is a bore."

He confesses, "We never really did our best and that is a sin of a special kind".

Yet there is hope of release. When someone among the living - even the dullest academic plodder - takes an interest in the work of an unfulfilled creator, that stirs things up. The creative spirit in Limbo may now seek to join forces with the person who is reviving or enlarging his work. So Hoffmann now plans to "stand at the shoulder" of Schnack, the feral, dirty young musical prodigy who wants to complete his opera (and has the budget for it) "and push her in the right direction, so far as I can."

In a conversation about The Lyre of Orpheus for The Camelot Project,  Robertson Davies said, "I write novels that I hope will be interesting just as stories, but they also have implications and byways which I think would interest people who have more information. That may conceivably lead them to form conclusions about the persistence of myth in what we are pleased to call real life. I get awfully tired of people who talk about real life as though it had no relation to the life of the imagination and the life of legends and myth. They would do better to look again, though the trouble is they don't know enough in order to know where to look."

Hoffmann's Arthurian opera is fiction but the Arthurian triangle plays out in the novel. The idea that secret working minds can reach to each other across death is no fiction to me. Yeats spoke of it as the "mingling of minds". Imagine that.

Art:  Léon Spilliaert, The Silhouette of the Artist (1907),. Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent. 

Flying with the Library Angel

It was probably that literate spirit Arthur Koestler called the  Library Angel who was my unseen companion on that passage in the Bardo of Air Travel. My in-flight reading was Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World, an excellent study of how Shakespeare rose from obscure origins. After I took my aisle seat, the fellow by the window asked how I was enjoying the book. Quite soon he was telling me how he was in Stratford the previous year when the news broke that a hitherto unknown portrait of Shakespeare had been identified in an Irish country house and was then on its way to the bard's birthplace.

    My literate rowmate proved to be an artist and glass-blower. He gave me his card, which included the following self-description:

Artist
pilgrim
bon vivant

This was one of the best three word self-definitions I had come across. He asked me to define my own work, and then asked me to explain the application of Active Dreaming techniques to healing. I spoke of how dreams diagnose illness and can be a factory of imagery for self-healing when symptoms develop, I recounted some personal experiences of growing and then transferring healing images to cancer patients. With deep emotion, the man told me he was flying to the West Coast to support a family member who was undergoing treatment for cancer. He jotted down the book titles I had mentioned.
      Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a young man who took the seat between us. More introductions ensued. The young man told us he was a vocalist who had sung with his college choir across the British Isles, and in many other places.
      I asked him whether it is true that composers tend to look down on librettists to the extent suggested in Robertson Davies' novel The Lyre of Orpheus, which I had finished the night before. He was unfamiliar with the novel, so I explained the plot, which turns on the creative pains and misadventures of an unlikely crew who set about trying to make an opera out of sketches by Hoffmann, with an entirely new libretto, while the long-dead composer watches from the limbo of composers who are waiting for someone to complete their unfinished work.
     "E.T.A. Hoffmann?" the new graduate echoed. "We studied him in my last semester." He gave me a rundown on Hoffmann's musical oeuvre, and asked about Hoffmann's second career as the author of dark fantasy stories, which were based in no small degree on his dreams and nightmares and sightings of apparitions, including several versions of the double or doppelganger.
    He spoke of a piece his choir had sung in his last concert, with lyrics from Goethe. His face fell when he added that the brilliant young composer was struggling with cancer. He had heard the tail end of my account of using dreams to develop imagery to help cancer patients, and asked me to repeat the book details.
    The bookish spirit with us on the flight was notably literate, far-traveled and caring.

Photo: Robertson Davies, marvelous Canadian novelist and sometime master of Massey College.