Carl Gustav Jung

The Duke of Dark Corners

Individuation

• Is a journey through life towards wholeness/ selfhood

• To reach wholeness one must reconcile the series of opposing forces in life

• It is important to achieve balance- a middle ground

Reconciling Opposites

• Some common oppositions include:

• Good-evil• Extrovert-introvert• Masculine-feminine• Think-feel• Birth-death• Animal-spiritual

Equivalence and Entropy

• Increase in one area (eg.think) means decrease in another (eg.feel)

• The distribution of energy in the psyche seeks an equilibrium or balance

• The ideal state of selfhood is balanced but not conflict free

Transcendent Function

• The joining of various opposing forces into a coherent middle ground.

• The Mandala- the magic circle is the symbol for wholeness and perfection

Jung’s Psyche

E go P e rson a l U n co nsc io us C o lle c tive U n con sc io us

T h e P syche

Ego

• The conscious mind• Like Freud’s ego it is

the part of our psyche that is above the surface

Personal Unconscious

• Repressed memories/ images unique to an individual

• Forgotten unpleasant elements which require some digging to be brought to the surface

Collective Unconscious

• Our psychic inheritance

• We are born with a reservoir of experiences faced by the human race

• Jung sees a relationship between individual dreams and the myths of peoples

Archetypes

• An archetype is an inherited predisposition to respond to certain aspects of the world

• Powerful patterns of action, creation and organization

• Through dreams, myths, stories, and works of art they emerge into consciousness as recurrent images

The Persona

• It represents the way we present ourselves to the outside world

• Comes from the Latin word for ‘mask’

• It is necessary to make a good impression but it may also be a false impression

The Self• Represents the centre and

the totality of the entire psyche

• Goal of living is to realize the self

• The God/ divine image-ultimate archetype is the self

• The more self-like you are, the less selfish you are

• Could be image of wind, a dove, Holy Grail, circle, cross, especially the Mandala

The Shadow

• The potential of experiencing the unconscious

• It may appear as chaos, evil, a threat, or a destructive force- wilderness, dark woods, witch, criminal

• The dark side of the self – we must acknowledge our shadows to achieve wholeness

The Trickster

• Role is to hamper the individual’s progress

• May appear as a jester or magician

The Anima or Animus• The soul – anima, the male

soul; animus, the female soul• Our soul is our inner gender

opposite• It is important to get in touch

with this aspect of our self if we are to achieve wholeness

• It is responsible for our love life-we are always looking for our other half

• Love at first sight is almost always anima/animus love

Chapter 2

• Dunny sets forth his purpose in writing this memoir to the Headmaster (later says it’s to be read only after his death)

• Angry at the patronizing/dismissive “farewell to the Cork” tone of Packer’s summing up of him

• 10 books, contributions to Analecta Bollandiana, ‘cast by Fate for the vital though never glorious role of Fifth Business’ (15)

• Packer a “religious illiterate”(15)• Dunny’s view of humanity: boys are

miniature men• Circumstances surrounding his retirement:

Dunny’s recent heart attack as Asst. Head and Sr.History Master after the death of lifelong friend Boy Staunton, chairman of the board of school, D.S.B., C.B.E.

Chapter 3

• Description of small-town life in early 2th century in Deptford (Thamesville), pop. 500, 15 miles from Pittstown (London).

• Scots (D’s mother and father) looked up to as arbiters of “common sense, prudence, and right opinions on virtually everything”(18).

• Mr.Ramsay chief mechanic, printer, publisher, and editor of The Deptford Banner

• Mrs.Ramsay has the cleanest privy in Deptford• Deptfordians look down on Bowles Corner (pop. 150)

inhabitants as hopelessly rustic.

Chapter 4

• Mrs.Ramsay the “high priestess” attending and orchestrating the birth of Paul Dempster 80 days premature

• Paul’s appearance: “looked so wretched that the doctor and my mother were frightened” (19) red, wrinkled like a tiny man, disproportionate, cry like mewing of kitten (20),hieous, misshapen (21)

• Amasa prays that God take Mary and Paul to Him• “one of those people who seem fated to be hurt and thrown

aside in life though…thought himself as important an actor as any of the others” (22) “We rarely recognize it when we are indeed supporting characters or even supernumeraries” (22)

Percy vs. Dunny over guilt

• Difference between Dunny and Percy over the snowball: Dunny overcome with guilt, but Percy denies it. “I knew that he was afraid, and I knew that he would fight, lie, do anything rather than admit what I knew….So I was alone in my guilt, and it tortured me” (23)

Dunny’s guilt

• “Whoever did it, the Devil guided his hand.”• Second reference to supernatural intervention –

Jung’s idea of “synchronicity” • Dunny doubly guilty: first about the deed (even

though he didn’t do it has to assume the guilt that Percy won’t) and secondly about covering it up

Chapter 5

• Mary has a “face like a pan of milk”(25)• With Paul, “she was as delighted as a little

girl with a doll” • Suspicion that Mary is “simple” –

breastfeeding unabashedly, gives away everything, laughs like a girl, soft voice, delicacy of expression, waving tendrils of hair – utterly unsuitable for a parson’s wife.

Chapter 6

• Dunny assigned job of being unofficial watchdog of Mary and Paul

• “Nursie” vs. “Pidgy Boy Boy”• “He and I were rivals, for though I had none of his graces

of person or wealth, I had a sharp tongue. I was raw-boned and wore clothes that had often made an earlier appearance on Willie, but I had a turn for sarcastic remarks, which were know to our group as ‘good ones’.

• ‘I thought I was in love with Leola….But, looking back on it now, I know I was in love with Mrs. Dempster. (30)

• Milo Papple “bughouse” joke – Dunny’s cork retort.

Chapter 7

• Isolation from other boys resulting from his allegiance to Mary Dempster

• Library job opens him up to world of wonders – Robert-Houdin’s The Secrets of Stage Conjuring and Professor Hoffmann’s Modern Magic and Later Magic.

• “As soon as saw them I knew that fate meant them for me. By studying them I should become a conjurer, astonish everybody, win the breathless admiration of Leola, and become a great power.” (33)

• Explain the appeal of magic for Donny

The Devouring Mother

• “She had missed the egg”(35)• Comment on the imagery, connotative diction in the description of the fight

between Mrs. Ramsay and Dunny• “I know Ill never have another anxious moment with own dear laddie.”• “How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had

pursued me round the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged with –what? Vengeance ? What was it?

• Thought he knew reading Freud – now not so sure, but “what I knew then was that nobody – not even my mother –was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.”

• “It was necessary for me to gain power in some realm which my parents – especially my mother – could not follow me.” (Magic)

• “I yearned for my mother’s love and hated myself for having grieved her, but quite as often I recognized that her love had a high price on it and that her idea of a good son was a pretty small potato.”

One view of faith

• “My teaching abilities had their first airing in that little library, and as I was fond of lecturing, I taught Paul more than I suspected” s(37)

• A Child’s Book of Saints: “We are only little babies to Him; we do not understand Him at all….He does not always answer our prayers in the way we would like, but in some but in some better way than we know…He is just a dear old Father” It was a fervent wish that He would come again : “People would not be so cruel to him now. Queen Victoria would not allow anyone to crucify him” (38)

• “Like this?” he said, taking the coin from my and performing the pass perfectly…that was the moment I became Paul's instructor” – Fifth Business

Thinking vs. Feeling

• How does Amasa use his collar and position to get at Dunny and Mary?Dunny’s “froward mouth”; Amasa’s “heavy cross”

• Pride posing as humility• Amasa a “feeler” rather than a “thinker” like Dunny and Dunny has learned

not to trust strong emotionalism• Card playing “the Devil’s picture book”; Books about saints was a vile

superstition from the Scarlet Woman of Rome (Roman Catholic Church)• “it seemed tome that Arabian Nights and the Bible were getting pretty close”• “But I had been worsted by moral bullying, b y Deptford’s conviction that he

was right and I was wrong, and that gave him an authority over me based on feeling rather than reason it was my first encounter with the emotional power of popular morality” (43)

The Pit as a Protestant Hell

• Note imagery in this passage as narrator develops the atmosphere of this desolate place: description of the homeless men driven to madness with alcohol abuse and open air living; the “jungles”, tramps’ bivouacs, the picture of Mrs. D. and the tramp copulating in the bleak, flat light of the flashlight. (47)

• “He was very civil, ‘Masa. And he wanted it so badly.”

Chapter 11

• View of townspeople:it was consensual;Amasa could lay no charges. Dr.MacCausland said such conduct indicated a “degeneration of the brain...probably progressive”(48)

• Amasa resigns as Baptist parson• Mr.Ramsay’s desire to help out family financially

causes huge quarrel with Mrs.Ramsay; her charitable façade is hypocritical – cp.Deptford’s tolerance of Cece Athelstan but not of Mary

• The shivaree where Amasa shows his moral cowardice

What does Dunny see in Mary?

• She was a wise woman..”had a breadth of outlook and clarity of vision that were strange and wonderful”….”It was her lack of fear, of apprehension, of assumption that whatever happened was inevitably going to lead to some worse state of affairs, that astonished me and enriched me” (52)

• “She was wholly religious. seemed to live in a world of trust that had nothing of the stricken, lifeless, unreal quality of religion about it….She lived by a light that arose from within…it seemed to be something akin to the splendours I found in books” (53)

• “I regarded her as my greatest friend, and the secret league between us was the tap-root that fed my life.”

• The other side of the coin: disordered cottage, Paul pitifully neglected in appearance, her encounter with the tramp. “I decided that this unknown aspect must be called madness” (57).

Chapter 12

• Dunny as a polymath; seen as a smart alec• Encounter with the village atheist who laughs at the ludicrous “facts”

of the Bible; but Dunny sees that atheists ar too literal – the Bible and Arabian Night are fabulous (fables) – full of metaphor which speak psychological truth if not literal truth

• Leola now the village beauty, and Percy’s girl• Milo Papple develops his comic repertoire further through comic

parody rather than breaking wind at will• Percy and Mabel Heighington caught “in flagrante delicto”• Leola forgave Percy “which made me cynical about women” (57)• Percy sent to Colborne College away from Mabel and where his

mother couldn’t baby him• Doc Staunton becoming a Sugar King (made a lot of money in sugar

beets)

Chapter 13

• Willie’s accident in the printing press and immersions• “From two to three I sat in Willie’s room reading and between three

and half past I did what I could for Willie while he died” (59). – great example of anticlimax and understatement

• Mary’s intervention: her complete lack of self-consciousness: hoisting , up her skirts, running through the streets, praying, holding his hand, later blowing him kisses:: “Willie sighed and moved his legs a little. I fainted.”

• “…what possessed me to turn to that woman, an insane degenerate, and bring herinto this house…?”

• Doc MacCausland’s theory about "clenched hands”. • Mary’s second miracle? What is her first

Chapter 14

• “It was clear that she now regarded a hint of tenderness toward Mrs. Dumpster as disloyalty to herself” (63)

• “Deep inside, I knew that to yield and promise what she wanted would be the end of anything that was good in me.”

• “I made a third choice.” –decides to enlist underage, breaking ties with family – a symbolic separation from Deptford

• “There’s just one thing to remember; whatever happens, it does no good to be afraid.”

• “In spite of her best efforts to keep the image of Percy bright in her heart, she discovered she really loved me, and would love me forever, and wait until I returned from the battlefields of Europe” (66)

2: I am Born Again

• Life in war: note the verbal economy with which Davies characterizes this period of abject misery and boredom:

• Dunny reading the Bible, particularly The Book of Revelations, the Crowned Woman standing on the crescent moon-reminds him of the Arabian Nights

• Nicknames “Deacon” and “Charlie”• “They could hardly conceive that anybody who

had read the Testament could be other than a Holy Joe –could have another, seemingly completely opposite side to his character.

2: Chapter 2

• November 1917, in • the third battle of Ypres, when Canadians

attempted to take Passchendaele – Dunny’s last battle in the Great War

• “I had a revolver, and shot all three at point-blank range. They did not even see me. There is no use in saying anything more about it.”(75)

Mother Mary Comes to Me

• “For 3 years I had kept my nerve by stifling my intelligence, but now I let the intelligence rip and the nerve dissolve I am sure there has been more wretchedness, right and despair in world history, but I set up a personal record that I have never since approached.”

• “…a statue of the Virgin and Child. .for the little Virgin was crowned, stood on a crescent moon, which in turn rested on a globe, and in the hand that did not hold the Child she carried a sceptre from which lilies sprang.

• “But what hit me worse than the blow of the shrapnel was that the face was Mrs. Dumpster's face.” (77) projection of his anima, a Virgin Mary or mother figure personifying patience, faith, forbearance, wisdom, lack of fear, when he needed these most.

• How similar or different is this psychologically from Elaine’s vision of the Virgin Mary on the bridge?

2: Chapter 3

• Return from near-death: the hero undergoes dismemberment ( loss of leg) and must dissociate from the devouring mother. Parents were told he died before they themselves died of the Spanish flu: “I was glad that I did not have to be my mother's own dear laddie any longer…or warp my nature to suit her confident demands. I knew she had eaten my father, and I was glad and I didn’t have to fight any longer to keep her from eating me.” (81)

• Diana marks him for her own – the Honorable and Canon epitomize the upper middle class in their attitude to sacrifices to be made in the war

2: Chapter 5

• Sexual initiation by Diana – connects it with his initiation into culture, theatre when he saw the musical show “The two, though very different, are not so unlike in psychological weight as you might suppose. Both were wonders, strange lands revealed to me in circumstances of great excitement.”

• Epiphany when he receives the Victoria Cross from the King: “We are public icons, we two: he an icon of kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet necessary.” Both recognize they are personas – hero and King by force of circumstance or Fate.

2: Chapter 6

• “What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much of a mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to acquire another—not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play Oedipus to both our hearts’ content.”

• “How, I wondered, had I been so stupid as to get myself mixed up with such a pinhead?” (89)-Leola

• The break-up:" I was too intellectual, she said, and analyzed matters on which feeling was the only true guide.” (91)Jung says if our dominant function is thinking (conscious mind),our opposite function will be the dominant way the unconscious mind works; however, it will be the weakest cognitive function of which we are conscious.

• After Dunstable’s symbolic death and escape from the devouring mother through his night sea-voyage (“the healing sea”) he must re-enter his mother (sexual union with Diana) to be reborn into a new orientation – breaks away from Diana, and is rebaptized (Dunstan) by Diana and reborn (rebis)

2: Chapter 7

• Personas for Dunny and Percy (Venus and Mars) and the love triangle

• confused feelings – doesn’t want Leola (pinhead) but doesn’t want Boy to have her (Boy is Dunny’s shadow – feels envy, contempt, spite but doesn’t know why)

• Why does he find the “Hang the Kaiser!” enactment so disturbing?

2: Chapter 8• What did Dunny go into his old house to get?• Significance of the conversation he has with Ada Blake, Willie’s girlfriend?• Milo’s gossip about the townspeople updates us on the changes in the four years that

Dunny’s been away from Deptford:

• Leola• Boy• Dr Staunton• Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay• Paul• Mary• Amasa• In the Deptford mythology, Leola is the Sleeping Princess and Boy the Rich Young

Ruler archetype.

• “I boarded the train….and left Deptford in the flesh. It was not for a long time that I realize that I never wholly left it in the spirit” (107)

3:Chapter 1

Dunny goes to U or T – major in History, M.A. – lonely “Youth was not my time to flower.”

Percy Boyd is now Boy – persona of the twenties “zeitgeist” – a dashing Scott Fitzgerald figure – knack for making money

Dunny envious of his style, charisma,sex appeal yet glad of his financial advice (ambivalence)

Boy an extrovert – girls, money, cars,,new challengesDunny an introvert – intellectual, spiritual, ,singlestill misses Diana (hard to leave mother figure)

Boy as twice-born

• Boy is already rebaptized, although by himself• in his second baptism,has left Deptford behind in

spirit, unlike Dunny• “It was characteristic of Boy throughout his life

that he was always the quintessence of something that somebody else had recognized and defined.” (114)

• “Boy seemed to have made himself out of nothing, and he was a marvel.” (114)

• Significance of new name?

3: Chapter 3

• Boy marries Leola (Prince marries the sleeping princess – the Cruickshanks keeping Leola in erotic escrow for Boy

• Boy has already surpassed his father in wealth ad power (symbolically slaying father)

• Boy and Dunny find themselves on the same ship voyaging to Europe but not in the same class (symbolic of their approach to life)

• Boy fascinated by Rev.Leadbeater’s view of Christ as a Donald Trump of his time, materialism as beauty (rubies in his handkerchief), and sentimentality as truth (sweet tooth in novels) – all extraversion, outer reality

3: Chapter 2

• Becomes schoolmaster at Colborne College (really Upper Canada College)

• Relationship between History (factual truth) and Myth (psychological truth)

• Women in his life: Agnes Day (Agnus Dei), Gloria Mundy (Gloria Mundi), Libby Doe (Libido) – had to wait for Love’s Old Sweet Song- the reviving drop of the cauldron of Ceridwen, a Welsh witch, patron of poetry, literature and nature.

3: Chapter 4

• Dunny looks for Madonna wood carving in Belgian battlefields – studies Madonna figures – becomes interested in saints – deepened his sense of wonder and religious awe

3: chapter 5

• Boy becomes aide-de-camp for HRH Prince of Wales -- Boy’s mentor but really a persona figure, not real

• Dunny refer to HRH’s tour of Canada as “one of those coincidences that we might be wiser to call synchronicities…something which heaved him, in a stroke, into a higher sphere and maintained him there” (126)

• Boy teaches Leola society manners, etiquette – finds her increasingly unsatisfactory as a society wife

3 Chapter 6• The Stauntons’ first child David is born/ Jazz Age period now over – they are Serious Young

Marrieds• Join Anglican Church which makes no demands on them but is the Church where the high WASP

society of Toronto go• Boy’s advice to Dunny: “If you don’t hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned

soon show you what you’ll get” (129)• “I wasn’t sure I wanted to issue orders to Life. I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to

take a formative hand in my affairs.”• Dunny – consciously a thinker, but unconsciously a feeler;• Boy – consciously a feeler,but unconsciously a thinker, controlling his life, bullying Leola into

submission, judgmental of Dunny• Joel Surgeoner – synchronicity- singling Dunny out as a doubting Thomas – later explains his

disdain for police-court truth over stories which “strengthen their faith” • Mary’s submission to him was “glory coming into my life”,proof of God’s grace, a “purifying

experience” – a miracle: “She is a blessed saint for what she did for me”• Joel thanks Dunny for his donation: “Do you see now how prayers are answered?” (136)-not always

that way we expect them to be• Through Mary Surgeoner is reborn• “What Surgeoner told me made it clear that any new life must include Deptford. There was to be no

release by muffling up the path.”cf.Paul and Boy who can’tdo enough to escape their past.

3: Chapter 7

• Mr.Mahaffey (magistrate) has sneaking suspicion that Dunny knows more about the snowball incident than he’s letting on

• Is Dunny right to feel guilty still? “I still had a grudge against Boy for what he had done, but I remembered too that if I had not been so sly, Mr Dempster would not have been hit” (137)

• Sees Fr. Regan about Mary’s 3 miracles which would make her a saint – Regan pokes holes in his arguments – warns him against romanticizing Catholicism, flirting with “Mother Church”: “You like the romance, but you can’t bear the yoke” (138)

• Thinks Mary is a ‘fool-saint’ – someone who does good but it means nothing because they’re fools, or mad – Prudence is one of the cardinal virtues

• Is Regan a Wise Old Man archetype? Wise but limited in his wisdom; not open to anything but strict Church dogma- this a problem for Jung who thought Church too narrow in its view of Christ – psychological truth again: Mary is a real saint for Dunny

• Dunny ignores Father’s advice and visits Mary again

3: Chapter 8

• Bertha Shanklin’s guilt over not being more supportive of Mary after she married Amasa

• Speculation on what happened to Paul when he ran away with the circus: “As like as not he’s dead long since, and better so”(141)

• Mary confused, bothered by memories of being tied up, Paul disappearing and Amasa dying: “She always remembers him with a blue mouth, like a rotten hole in his face – telling God he forgave her for ruining his life. Amasa died praying, did you know?” (141)

• Why mouth “like a rotten hole”?• False saintliness of Amasa vs. real saintliness of Mary

3: Chapter 9• Stockmarket crash of ’29: Boy had tipped Dunny off so he didn’t lose his investments• -searching for Wilgefortis or Uncumber: a girl forced to marry against her will, grew a

beard, fiance repulsed and crucified – this prefigures the hermaphrodite figure of wholeness that Dunny is unconsciously seeking

• In Tyrolean village meets Faustus LeGrand, or Paul Dempster reborn. Paul’s mentor figure is Faust who made a deal with the devil to sacrifice his soul in order to gain wondrous powers

• Paul as a trickster archetype in Dunny’s life: changes language, no interest or desire to see his mother, steals wallet- like Boy, feels no guilt or responsibility for his mother:

• “I am sorry you have so little feeling for her”• “She is part of a past that cannot be recovered or changed by anything I can do now. My

father always told me it was my birth that robed her of her sanity. So as a child I had to carry the eight of my mother’s madness as something that was my own doing. And I had to bear the cruelty of people who thought her kind of madness wa funny—a dirty joke. So far as I am concerned it is over and if she dies mad, who will not say that she is better dead?”

• Paul a thinker, like Dunny, but must come to terms with his unconscious feeling side.

4: Gyges and King Candaules• Chapter 1: Boy making money in the Depression –”I feel I should do everything I can to

see that people have necessities” while drinking his excellent scotch and soda.• He doesn’t see his own hypocrisy “..declaring that they would hold the price of bread

steady. And they did so, though the loaves seemed to be a bit puffier and gassier than they had been before” (150)

• Boy confides in Dunny regarding Leola- at 32,losing some of her girlish charm/ no longer fulfilling the role of his anima

• Boy studies Dr.Coue and auto-suggestion “Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.” There is no real improvement and it’s external rather than internal

• Dunny as the Royal Eunuch: Boy showing D. nude pictures of L. Dunny reminds him of the myth of Candaules – proud of his wife’s beauty, he showed her naked to friend Gyges

• 2 endings: in one the Queen and Gyges fall in love and dethrone Candaules; in the other, Gyges kills Candaules – Boy thinks this is impossible – foreshadowing? Will Dunny kill boy?

• Shows the power of myth in speaking psychological truth• Despite wealth and tremendous external success, Boy is not happy and doesn’t know

why

4: Chapter 2

• 1932 Bertha Shanklin dies, naming Dunstan as executor of her estate which goes mainly to care for Mary

• Orpheus Wettenhall, Bertha’s lawyer, kills himself when he knows the truth of his embezzlement will come out: he has used Bertha’s money to invest and has lost his investments –yet people defended him and thought Bertha showed “poor taste in dying so soon and embarrassing the local Nimrod”. (162)

• Dunny learned 2 lessons: “that popularity and good character are not related, and that compassion dulls the mind faster than brandy.”

• As guardian of Mary, Dunny has her placed in a public hospital for the insane

4: chapter 3

• Writes to the Bollandist Society about the bearded lady saint and finds them very receptive and wanting to meet a “serious hagiographer” like Dunny (166)

• Dunny often invited to Boy’s dinner parties: Boy’s friends are smug,self-satisfied, patronizing, shallow, believing they’re in control of their Destiny, and the ordinary man is shiftless and lazy

• Dunny sometimes doubts his choices in life: 34, single, childless, “dreaming (his) life away”.

• “My path was certainly an odd one for a Deptford lad, raised as a Protestant, but fate had pushed me in this direction so firmly that to resist would be dangerous defiance. For I was, as you have already guessed, a collaborator with Destiny, not one who put a pistol to its head and demanded particular treasures. The only thing for me to do was to keep on keeping on, to have faith in my whim and remember that for me, as for the saints, illumination when it came would probably come from some unexpected source” (169)

Blazon as Wise Old Man Archetype

• Padre Blazon: “Mankind cannot ensure perfection; it stifles him…even saints should cast a shadow.” miracles happen quite often – he himself was a miracle – only son in family of 7 girls – looking to reconcile the wisdom of the body (matter) with the wisdom of the soul spirit)

• “Find your answer in psychological truth, not objective truth.”

• Begin by forgiving yourself for being human• Saints are not wise but instead do spectacular things (Mrs.

Dempster)• “What figure is she in your personal mythology?” (177)

Understanding the Subtlety

• Einstein: “God is subtle, but He is not cruel.” “Try to understand the subtlety and stop whimpering about the cruelty” (178)

•I think you are a fool to fret that she was knocked on the head because of an act of yours. Perhaps that was what she was for,,Ramezay. She saved you on the battlefield, you say. But did she no also save you when she took the blow that was meant for you. ..Maybe God wants you for something special. Maybe so much you are worth a woman’sanity.”(178)

• Padre Blazon looking for a God who will teach him how to grow old (176)

4: chapter 4

• If Dunny felt so bad about Mrs. Dempster’s situation, why didn’t he got to Boy and ask for money to have her put in a better place?

• 1) “Staunton did not like to reminded of Deptford except as a joke.”

• 2) “Boy had a way of dominating anything with which he was associated….He would have established himself as Mrs. D’s patron and saviour and I would have been demoted to his agent”

• 3)”I was determined that if I could not take care of Mrs. D, nobody else should do it. She was mine.” (180)

Dunny and Boy at mid-life

• Completed first book: A Hundred Saints for Travellers• Boy thinks Freud a madman to be so obsessed with sex, but sex “was

so much of the very grain of Boy’s life that he noticed itno more than the air he breathed.”

• Dunny “much more concerned with that old fantastical duke of dark corners, C.G. Jung”(182)

• Boy won’t let David play with a doll, provides him with “manly” toys, indulges and spoils his “princess” Caroline, and ignores Leola

• “Explicit about his sexual needs: he had to have intercourse often, and it had to be all sorts of things – intense, passionate, cruel, witty challenging – and he had to have it with a Real Woman.

• “It all sound very exhausting and strangely like a sharp workout with the punching bag.” (183)

Boy still searching for his anima• Corporate homosexuality- Boy’s new anima is an animus – a projection of himself in a

younger form (his proteges – ultimately tires of them – prefiguring ?• The Prince of Wales abdicates the throne on 11 December 1936 “for the woman I love”• Christmas that year: Leola in tears, David in room with a book he wasn’t reading,

Caroline rampaging through the house demanding attention for a doll she had broken, Boy moping over King’s abdication

• Leola discovers the woman’s note in Boy’s pocket• Boy leaves• Leola tries to seduce Boy, attempts to kill herself, leaves suicide note implicating Dunny

as her lover, children know of attempted suicide• The aftermath when Boy returns a several days later: Leola “had joined the great

company of the walking wounded in the battle of life.” David becomes increasingly quiet, Caroline a screamer and tantrum-thrower.

• “David told me many years later that he hated Christmas more than any other day in the calendar.” (189)

• signifies a turn in the tide of Boy’s life

5: LieslChapter 1

• Boy at his zenith in terms of power, influence: involved in the war effort, feeding the armed forces, nation & Britain

• Hardly sees family in Toronto—he’s in Ottawa• Makes David go to Colborne College as a

boarding student from the age of 10 on• “Although I cannot vouch for this, I have always

thought it suspicious that Leola opened her windows one afternoon, when the nurse had closed them, and took a chill, and was dead in less than a week (193).

Boy is too busy to attend

• “He asked me by cable to do what had to be done, so I arranged the funeral” (193)

• “Poor Mum, I guess she’s better off, really (193).• “There were not a great many present, for all the

Stauntons’ friends were important people, and it seemed that all the important people were so busy fighting the war in one way or another that they could not come. But there were mountains of costly flowers, looking particularly foolish under a November sky (193).

Milo’s mythology

• “It’s the end of a great romance. You know we always thought her and Perse was the handsomest pair that ever got married in Deptford. And I know why you never got married It must be tough on you to see her go, Dunny”

• “My shame was that it was not tough at all . What wa tough was to go with David back to that awful, empty house and talk to him until the servants gave us a poor dinner….” (19)

Dunny “unsuitable” as post-war Headmaster

• “Dunny, you’ve “done a superb job during the whole of the war….but it was fun, wasn’t it?”

• “You don’t want to go on being Head, do you?”• “They want a younger Headmaster.”• “A Headmaster needs a wife.”• “You’re queer”• “Parents nowadays want someone more like

themselves.” ( or like Boy himself)

Dunny in Mexico

• “..the picture was…the Virgin, a peasant girl of about fifteen, stood on a crescent moon”(198)

• My eyes were on the kneeling petitioners whose faces had the beauty virtually every face reveals in the presence of the goddess of mercy, the Holy Mother, the figure of divine compassion.

• “…Anticlericalism and American bustle will soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses. But where…will mercy and divine compassion come from then? Or are such things necessary to people who are well fed and know the wonders that lie concealed in an atom? I don’t regret economic and educational advance: I just wonder how much we shall have to pay for it, and in what coin” (199).

The human need to wonder

• “Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from sone deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvellous is indeed an aspect of the real” (199)

Magnus Eisengrim

• Magnus – Large, grand; also a nuance of Magus (the magician, trickster archetype)

• Eisengrim- grim wolf• “…he did not present himself as a funny man but

as one who offered an entertainment of mystery and beauty, with a hint of terror as well….A poetic magician who took himself seriously.”

• “..so self-assured, so polished, so utterly unlike the circus conjurer with the moustache and beard and shabby clothes whom I had met in Le grand cirque..more than 15 years before” (201-2)

The Vision of Dr. Faustus

• “the spice of cruelty seemed the please the audience very much”(204)

• “the conflict was between Sacred and Profane Love for the soul of Faust”

• “It was plain enough that Gretchen and Venus were the same girl…conveyed the message that beauty of spirit and lively sensuality might inhabit one body”

• ..the beautiful Faustina (appeared) once more as…the Eternal Feminine, radiating compassion while showing a satisfactory amount of leg”

• “Mephistopheles threw aside his robe and showed that…this was certainly Eisengrim the Great” (204)

Liesl as Hermaphrodite

• “the person who was speaking to me…was probably a woman but she wore man’s dress, had short hair, and was certainly the ugliest human creature I had ever seen….She was tall, straight, and obviously very strong, but she had big hands and feet, a huge, jutting jaw, and a heaviness of bone over the eyes that seemed to confine them to small, very deep caverns….Her voice was beautiful and her utterance was an educated speech of some foreign flavour” (205)

More on Liesl

• “Liesl became less ugly after an hour or two…her shirt was soft and her beautiful scarf was drawn through a ring…her short hair was smartly arranged…nothing could mitigate the extreme, the deformed ugliness of her face, but she was graceful, had a charming voice, and gave evidence of a keen intelligence held in check so that Eisengrim might dominate the conversation” (207)

• “A distinguished hagiographer does not often come our way”

• “There is more than one kind of magic. This speech had the effect of revealing to me that Liesl was not nearly so ugly as I had thought, and was indeed a woman of captivating intellect and charm…” (209)

Chapter 4

• “I thought that much of his extraordinarily impressive personality arose from his ignorance – or rather from his lack of a headful of shallow information that would have enable him to hold his own in a commonplace way among commonplace people”

• The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon, the great priest-magician that knew the past and could foretell the future

• “Liesl’s job was to speak for the Brazen Head…she was a woman of formidable intelligence and intuition”(214)

Something wrong with Dunstan

• “Two things that were wrong I could easily identify: I had become a dangerously indiscreet talker, and I was in love with the beautiful Faustina”

• Liesl’s Dunny “confidante”, the financial backer,chief mechanic and artificer of the Brazen Head, and Paul’s closest associate.

Liesl’s advice to Dunny

• “There is really no such thing as a secret; everybody likes to tell, and everybody does tell…you have paid such a price and you look like a man full of secrets- grim-mouthed and buttoned-up and hard-eyed and cruel, because you are cruel to yourself. It has done you good to tell what you know; you look much more human already”(217)

More advice

• “You despise almost everybody except Paul’s mother…you have made her carry the affection you should have spread among fifty people...that horrid village and your hateful Scots family made you a moral monster….Well, it is not too late for you to enjoy a few years of almost normal humanity” (217)

Eisengrim’s love

• “it was clear enough to me that his compelling love affair was with himself; his mind was always on his public personality, and on the illusions over which he fussed psychologically quite as much as Liesl did mechanically. I had seen a good deal of egotism in my life, and I knew that it starved love for anyone else and sometimes burned it out completely. Had it not been so with Boy and Leola? (220)

Collapse of the Spirit

• “The door was open and I saw Faustina naked – she was always changing her clothes – in the arms of Liesl, who held her close and kissed her passionately; she had her left arm around Faustina, and her right hand was concealed from me, but the movement of Faustina’s hips and her dreamy murmurs made it clear, even to my unaccustomed eyes, what their embrace was”

• “…this time there was no Little Madonna to offer my courage or ease me into oblivion” (220

St. Dunstan and the Devil

• “She is of the earth, and her body is her shop and her temple, and whatever her body tells her is all of the law and the prophets.”

• “You talk as if you though you were God.”• “That is your privilege, you pseudo-cynical old

pussy cat, watching life from the sidelines and knowing where all the players go wrong. Life is a spectator sport to you. Now you have take a tumble, and found yourself in the middle of the fight, and you are whimpering because it is rough”(222)

The Mystical Marriage

• “…she caught up my wooden leg and hit me such a crack over my single shin that I roared and cursed.” Significance?

• As she turned (the door) I got a hold on the bedhead with one hand, and seized her nose between the fingers of the other, and gave it such a twist that I thought I heard something crack. She shrieked, managed to tug the door open, and thundered down the passage” (224)

• The elderly Spanish gentleman and his protestations about the noisy lovemaking and subsequent apology

Revenge of the unlived life

• “You are a decent chap to everybody, except one special somebody, and that is Dunstan Ramsay. How can you be really good to anybody if you are not good to yourself?”

• “There is a whole great piece of your life that is unlived, denied, set aside. That is why at 50 you can’t bear it any longer and fly all to pieces and pour out your heart to the first really intelligent woman you have me – me,--and get into a schoolboy yearning for a girl who is a far from you as if she lived on the moon. This is the revenge of the unlived life, Ramsay. Suddenly it makes a fool of you” (226)

Dunny’s personal devil

• “Oh, this Christianity! Even when people swear they don’t believe in it, the 1500 years of Christianity that has made our world is in their bones, and they want to show they can be Christians without Christ. Those are the worst: they have the cruelty of doctrine without the poetic grace of myth….Why don’t you…do something inexplicable, irrational, at the devil’s biding and just for the hell of it? …What I am saying is not for everybody..only for the twice-born. One always knows the twice-born. They often go so far as to take new names?...Do you know what my name really means, Liselotte Vitzliputzli? (226-7)

“I think you are 5th Business”

“You must have a prima donna- always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.”

Fifth Business defined

• “But you cannot make a plot work with another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have fifth business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero’s birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keep the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody’s death if that is part of the plot.

The vital though never glorious role

• “The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices. Are you fifth Business? You had better find out” (227)

Embracing one’s devil

• “We talked until a clock somewhere struck four and then fell happily asleep but not without having achieved the purpose for which Liesl had first of all invaded my room.”

• “And with such a gargoyle! And yet never have I known such deep delight or such an aftermath of healing tenderness!” (227)

6: The Soiree of Illusions

• Magnus takes responsibility for partially maintaining his mother: “He did not want to do it, swore that he owed her nothing and had indeed been driven from home by her bad reputation. I pointed out to him, however, that if this had not been the case, he would not have become the Great Eisengim but would probably be a Baptist parson in rural Canada” (230)

• “I seem to have turned Mrs. Dempster from a woman who was simple and nothing worse, into a woman who knew there wa a plot to deprive her of her little son, and that I was its agent” (233)

6: chapter 2• “Thus I lost, for a time, one of the fixed stars in my universe”(233).• Another loss: Boy married again, and Denyse did not like Dunny• Boy’s political life: MP as a result of a by-election “The Conservative Party found him

an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public” (235)• “It was here that Denyse’s masculinity of mind showed itself with the greatest clarity”

(236)• “I can’t help you there. (getting the wife needed for the L-G’s office). You’re on your

own so far as that goes.”• Denyse plays coy: could a rep of the Crown have a wife who was a divorcee?• “There had been other men”• “People might imagine that she married him for his money or the position he could give

her.” • “…thought of him...as a Canadian Coriolanus, (giving) it to those sons of bitches who

had turned on him at the last election…a really great man too proud to shake hands and kiss babies to persuade a lot of riffraff to let hm do what he was obviously born to do”(238)

The happy family

• Comic characterization of Lorene• David the drunk• Caroline as unpleasant as ever• Denyse “had a fair measure of intuition and sense that I

regarded woman as something other than fellow citizens who had been given an economic raw deal because of a few unimportant biological differences” (24)

• “She was a woman whose life and interest were entirely external: It was not that she was indifferent to the things of the spirit: she sensed their existence and declared herself their enemy”. (240)

The tide turns for Boy

• Boy “denounced me petulantly for what he called my triviality of mind and my encouragement of superstition…he had not read the book…he could not stand such stuff because he was an atheist” (241).

• “I’m not surprised. You created a God in your own image, and when you found out he was no good you abolished him….a quite common form of psychological suicide” (241).

Whom the gods hate they keep forever young

• “I feel rotten. I’ve done just about everything I’ve ever planned to do, and everybody thinks I’m a success. And of course I have Denyse now to keep me upto the mark, which is lucky… But sometimes, I wish I could get into a car and drive away from the whole damned thing” (242)

• “You must grow old, Boy; you’ll have to find out what age means, and how to be old” (242).

• “That’s the most lunatic defeatist nonsense I’ve ever heard”

The revenge of the repressed

• “I have never thought that traits strong in childhood disappear; they may go underground or they may be transmuted into something else, but they donot vanish; very often they make a vigorous appearance after the meridian of life has been passed. My boyhood trick of getting off good ones that went far beyond any necessary self-defence and were likely to wound had come back to me in my fifties. I was going to be a sharp-tongued old man as I had been a sharp-tongued boy”(242)

The persona wears thin

• “Boy Staunton had reached a point in life where he no longer tried to conceal his naked wish to dominate everybody and was angry and ugly when things went against him.

• “As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin” (242).

6: chapter 4

• I kept up a kind of dismal stoicism unil I went to bed, and then I wept. I had not done such a thing since my mother had beaten me so many years before– no, not even in the worst of the war – and it frightened and hurt me. When at last I fell asleep I dreamed frightening dreams, in some of which my mother figured in terrible forms” (244)

• “Saints....give off a sweet odour when they are dead; in many instances it has been likened to the scent of violets So I bent over the head of Mary Dempster and sniffed for this true odour of sanctity” (245)

Padre Blazon revisited

• “She thinks I am an ogre disguised as an old Jesuit.”• “I have been thinking about your fool-saint: she must have

been an extraordinary person, a great lover of God, and trusting greatly in His love for her…it seems far more important…that her life was lived heroically; she endured a hard fate, did the best she could, and kept it up until at last her madness was too powerful for her. Heroism ijn God’s cause is the mark of the saint, Ramezay, not conjuring tricks…your life has been illuminated by your fool-saint, and how many can say so much?

Have you met the Devil yet?

• “I met Him in Mexico City. He was disguised as a woman- an extremely ugly woman but unquestionably a woman.”

• “He even suggested that an acquaintance with Him might improve my character.”

• “The Devil knows corner of us all of which Christ Himself is ignorant. I am sure Christ learned a great deal that was salutary about Himself when he met the Devil in the wilderness. Of course, that was a meeting of brothers.” (249)

• “You met the Devil as an equal not cringing or frightened or begging for a trashy favour. You are fit to be the Devil’s friend, without any fear of losing yourself to Him!”

I have not yet found a God to teach me how to grow old; have you?

• “Yes, I have found Him, and He is the very best of company: we do, but He is.

• “For here Salzburg) at last, after having abandoned hope and forgotten my search, I found the Little Madonna I had seen….at Passchendaele….her foot set on the crescent moon. Benath this moon was what I had not seen in he flare..the globe of the earth itself, a serpent encircling it, an apple in the mouth of the serpent He had lost her sceptre, ut not the Divine Child..not the face of Mary Dempster “but the expression was undeniably hers- an expression of mercy and love, tempered with perception and penetration.”

• “I needed no picture. She was mine forever.” (251)

Boy dies

• “At about 4 o’clock on the morning of November 4, 1968, his Cadillac convertible was recovered from the waters of Toronto harbour, into which it had been driven at a speed great enough to carry it, as it sank, about 20 feet from the concrete pier. His body was in the driver’s seat, the hands gripping the wheel so tightly that it was very difficult for the police to remove him from the car. But the most curious fact of all was that in Boy’s mouth the police found a stone – an ordinary piece of pinkish granite about the size of a small egg- which could not possibly have been where it was unless he himself, or someone unknown had put it there.”

The variability of truth

• Eisengrim’s visit to the school: “He emphasized the fact that nobody can be made to do anything under hypnotism that is contrary to his wishes, though of course people have wishes that they are unwilling to acknowledge, even to themselves” (255)

• Boy meets Magnus: “I was conscious already that Boy was up to one of his special displays of charm….he had put his foot wrong with Eisengrim by asking him the real secret of an illusion. ..Eisengrim had been sharp enough with his to arouse hostility, and Boy loved to defeat hostility by turning the other cheek. Eisengrim further topped him by the little bit of observation about the letter.

Boy Meets his Shadow

• “It was clear to me that one of those sympathies, or antipathies, or at any rate unusual states of feeling had arisen between these two which sometimes leads to falling in love, to sudden warm friendships, or to lasting and rancorous enmities…which are always extraordinary.”

• “It was like Boy to seek to ingratiate himself with the new friend by treating the old friend with genial contempt.”(257)

Puer Eternus vs. Grim Wolf

• “I was amazed that Paul would tell him such a thing (that Dunny wrote his Autobiography)…he, like Boy, was prepared to play some high cards in this game of topping each other.”

• “I remember you very well. I always thought of you as the Rich Young Ruler.”

• “He (Dunny) was my only teacher till I ran away with the circus.”

• “You know I wanted to do that. I suppose it is part of every boy’s dream” (25()

Magnus’s Faustian contract

• “Then boys are lucky it remains a dream”• Magnus recounts his experiences with Willard the

Wizard who had a weakness for boys and morphine

• “I was chained to Willard by fear; I was his thing and his creature, and I learned conjuring as a reward. One always learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence, though my case was spectacular.”

• Willard declined from conjurer to Wild Man (geek) and Le Solitaire des forets.

Guilt vs. Shame

• “I was too young for the kind of guilt my father wanted me to feel; he had an extraordinary belief in guilt as an educative force. I couldn’t stand it. I cannot feel guilt now. But I can call up in an instant what it felt like to be the child of a woman everybody jeered at the thought a dirty joke– including you, the Rich Young Ruler”

Psychological truth

• “..I had to accept it as a fact that he had so far edited his memory of his early days that the incident of the snowball had quite vanished from his mind. But had not Paul edited his memories so that only pain and cruelty remained? I began to wonder what I had erased from my own recollection” (261)

Significance of their new names

• “You have always wanted to be loved; nobody responds quite as we would wish, and people are suspicious of a public figure who wants to be loved. I have been wiser than you. I chose a Wolf’s name. You have chosen forever to be a Boy. Was it because your mother used to call you Pidgy Boy-Boy, even when you were old enough to call my mother “hoor”? (262)

All three company of the twice-born

• “Hard people..especially your mother.”

• “Wrong.” and I told him how my mother had worked and schemed and devised a nest to keep him alive, and exulted when he decided to live.”

• “Now it was his turn to be disconcerted.” (262)

The “cigar humidor”

• “Why would you keep a thing like that with you?• “A form of guilt unexpiated.”• “Guilt?” said Eisengrim.

Here it was. Either I spoke now or I kept silence forever. Dunstan Ramsay counselled against revelation, but Fifth Business would not hear.“Yes, guilt. Staunton and I robbed your mother of her sanity.” And I told them the story of the snowball.

The aftermath

• Too bad, but if I may say so, I think you’ve let the thing built up into something it never was. I threw the snowball…and you dodged it..It precipitated something which was probably going to happen anyhow. The difference between us is that you’ve brooded over it and I’ve forgotten it. We’ve both done far more important things since…you know what boys are.” (23)

The stone as self archetype

• “It is the stone you put in the snowball you threw at Mrs. Dempster. I’ve kept it because I couldn’t part with it. Boy, for God’s sake, get to know something about yourself. The stone-in-the-snowball has been characteristic of too much you’ve done to forget it forever.” (264)

• “I’m simply trying to recover something of the totality of your life-don’t you want to possess it as a whole- the bad with th good? I told you once you’d made a God of yourself, and the insufficiency of it forced you to become an atheist. It’s time you tried to be a human being.” (264)

The missing paperweight

• “You’re trying to get me. You want to humiliate me in front of this man her; you seem to have been in cahoots with him for years, though you never mentioned him or his miserable mother to me – your best friend, and your patron and protector against your own incompetence!” (264)

• “Let me give you a lift”. Of course; he wanted to blackguard me to Eisengrim in the car.

• “Do you want to take this with you, Paul?”• “No thanks, Ramsay. I have everything I need.

6:Chapter 8

• “Who killed Boy Staunton?”• “He was killed by the usual cabal: by himself,

first of all; by the woman he knew; by the woman he did not know; by the man who granted his inmost wish; and by the inevitable fifth, who was keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone.”

• “Of course, Denyse thought ‘the woman he knew’ must be herself.’

Who are the usual cabal?

• “I knew nothing about it, because it was there, in that box, that I had my seizure and was rushed to the hospital, as I was afterward told, by a foreign lady”.

• “Deeply sorry about your illness which was my fault as much as most such things are anybody’s fault. But I could not resist my temptation as I beg you not to resist this one: one to Switzerland and join the Basso and the Brazen Head. We shall have some high old times before The Five make an end of us all.” Love, L.V.

More Jungian Theory

• “In the individuation process, something obsolete must be left behind to die in order that the new man may be born.” C.G.Jung

• “The individuation process is part of the mystery of transformation pervading all creation. It includes the secret of life which is ceaselessly reborn in passing through an ever-renewed “death.”

Four Births

• 1st: bodily man steps into life from mother’s womb

• 2nd: at puberty, ego frees itself from its fusion with parental authority, acquires a defined form, independence and responsibility

• 3rd: when spiritual body emerges from conflicts of middle life and anchored again in depths of psyche, allies himself with Self (rebirth)

• 4th: Man departs through the door of life ad re-enters vast, unexplored land beyond death, from where he came

“It is not in the goal but in the striving towards this goal that gives

life content, meaning.”• If man is to live, he must fight and sacrifice

his longing for the past in order to rise to his own heights. Having reached the noonday heights, he must sacrifice his love for his own achievement, for he may not loiter. The sun, too, sacrifices its greatest strength in order to hasten onward to the fruits of autumn, which are the seeds of rebirth.

“If the sacrifice is made willingly, transformation & rebirth ensues.”

• Understanding inner and outer reality is key to meaning. To surrender oneself to both realms is essential to full individuation.

• Running away from the past to new (Boy) or protecting oneself from what is new (Dunny) and strange are both stages of neurosis. One separates himself from the past; the other, the future. They need to shatter their narrow range of consciousness in the tension of opposites and build to a wider, higher consciousness.

• No risk or suffering should be shunned• One must face everything that comes and hold out against fate (let

things happen)• The ability ot live open-eyed with one’s darkness demands courage

and forbearance -- that is the heroic life.