For the past five weeks we’ve been dipping into C. G. Jung’s theories of archetypes and the unconscious. Jung’s theories being generally poorly understood by most people who haven’t read the subject, there’s no tl;dr version, even of my sketchy explanations. If you want to get out of this diary anything beyond the most superficial understanding of the archetype in fantasy: sorry, you need to read the backlist:
It’s a lot of reading, I know, and it’s a pale shadow of Jung’s own rich writing, which I highly recommend you pick up for yourself. Jung reads very well aloud; he’s slow and dense, highly allusive, and you’ll learn something interesting in almost every paragraph, even though he also has his flaws. For one thing, he circles a point for a long time before actually making it; for a reader accustomed to clarity and crisp lean prose his discursiveness can be maddening. For another, he’s dated. His examples and illustrations bear the marks and prejudices of his age, which means that he can veer sharply into sexist, racist, Christo- and Euro-centric territories. In other words, his sensibilities are more than a century old, so we have to bear with the unenlightened old dude. All of our annoyances are beside the point when set against what he accomplished: a serious investigation into the human mind. What might at first have been an attempt at “curing” mental illness gave way to his greater passion, understanding the mind for its own sake. Herewith ends my Read Jung For Yourself recommendation.
Because tonight I promised something else: to begin looking at how this operates in fantasy literature. I’ve written rather often in the last couple of years that one of fantasy’s great strengths is the ability to make metaphors real and concrete. I’ve also written often that Jung is a favorite for fantasy writers, because his theories and understanding of the human mind as possessing a powerful common reservoir of history and knowledge in the collective unconscious, his structuring of the mind’s architecture, and his explanation of the power and animating force of archetypes, all find resonance in the makers of different realities. If you’ve been following along, this is not surprising (even if you haven’t been following along, it’s probably not a surprise.)
Tonight, I want to look at what is probably the most unironic and substantive treatment of Jung’s archetype of the shadow around: Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. First published in 1968 and often mis-classified as children’s literature or YA, A Wizard of Earthsea takes the archetype of the shadow and makes it a real thing.
In Jung, as you recall, the shadow is the first archetype we meet on the threshold of the unconscious. It’s only through the shadow that other archetypes can emerge. We have to go through the shadow to get to the rich content of the unconscious. So what is the shadow? You know this already:
The shadow is everything about our selves that we repress, everything we don’t like. It’s the hate speech we don’t voice, the murder we don’t commit, the cruelty do our best to forget. We tend mightily to project our shadow selves on to people who remind us of ourselves, and often you’ll find that what you hate in someone else is the very thing you don’t want to accept in yourself. You can’t get to deeper honest wisdom about life itself if you can’t know yourself completely, which means you have to accept whatever it is you find there, and it is never pleasant or pretty.
In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged finds that his shadow is an immensely dangerous thing (remember, in fantasy, metaphor = real thing). His first presentiment of his shadow emerges early, when a young woman “pricks” his pride and self-esteem (pun entirely intended—because Ged is both an adolescent boy and a kid with an enormous chip on his shoulder). The girl’s mockery sends Ged to a book of spells he’s not prepared to read, and to one particular spell he’s not supposed to see:
As he read it, puzzling out the runes and symbols one by one, horror came over him. His eyes were fixed, and he could not lift them till he had finished reading all the spell.
Then raising his head he saw it was dark in the house. He had been reading without any light, in the darkness. He could not now make out the runes when he looked down at the book. Yet the horror grew in him, seeming to hold him bound in his chair. He was cold. Looking over his shoulder he saw that something was crouching beside the closed door, a shapeless clot of shadow darker than the darkness. It seemed to reach out towards him, and to whisper, and to call to him in a whisper: but he could not understand the words. (1, pp. 22-23)
The shadow escapes when Ged’s master, Ogion, interrupts. It’s a shadow of a shadow that will follow him. And it happens on the cusp of maturity, as Jung suggests it will. Jungian psychologist Jolande Jacobi (whose explanations of Jung are second only to Jung’s own explanations), phrased it thus:
The development of the shadow runs parallel to that of the ego; qualities which the ego does not need or cannot make use of are set aside or repressed, and thus they play little or no part in the conscious life of the individual. Accordingly, a child has no real shadow, but his shadow becomes more pronounced as his ego grows in stability and range. [emphasis mine] (2, p. 107)
The shadow his reading set free (and the spell was a spell for summoning the dead—a reference to a child’s first intimation of mortality if ever there was one) follows Ged to Roke and the School for Wizards,
Stepping forward then he entered the open doorway. Yet it seemed to him that though the light was behind him, a shadow followed him in at his heels. (1, p. 34)
The shadow always follows and, unacknowledged, grows in darkness and potency. Ged, a quick student, finds himself increasingly irritated by another know-it-all, one who’s known more luxuries and possesses fewer talents, Jasper. Ged’s jealousy and irritation goads him into real folly: in order to humiliate Jasper, Ged attempts the forbidden spell, and the shadow that started out as presentiment becomes terrifyingly real.
Then the sallow oval between Ged’s arms grew bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow, quick and hideous, and it leaped straight out at Ged’s face….
Vetch alone ran forward to his friend. So only he saw the lump of shadow that clung to Ged, tearing at his flesh. It was like a black beast, the size of a young child, though it seemed to swell and shrink; and it had no head or face, only the four taloned paws with which it gripped and tore…. (1, p. 61)
The attacking shadow flees again at the approach of a mage, and flees Roke itself, leaving Ged near death.
If Ged had died that night [the shadow] might have tried to find the doorway he had opened, and follow him into death’s realm, or slip back into whatever place it had come from; for this the Summoner waited on Roke Knoll. But Ged lived. (1, pp. 62-63)
Ged lives, and the shadow is on the loose. After he leaves Roke, the shadow haunts and hunts him, fouling his plans, damaging his relationships and his prospects until running from it is all he can do. Although the Archmage has told him that some dark powers have no names, the dragon Yevaud offers Ged to trade the shadow’s name for his own. This is not a small thing, since knowing the name of a thing gives the speaker power over that thing.
If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. Who knows a man’s name, holds that man’s life in his keeping. (1, p. 69)
Ged doubts the shadow has a name, and even if it does, he despairs ever knowing it. Despite the great power he can wield, despite all the knowledge he’s acquired, Ged is reduced to running for his life as the darkness he’s loosed into the world gains in power, kills his companion otak, possesses the body of a dead man and entraps him where dark powers of the earth try to possess him. His flight leads him back to his teacher, Ogion, who counsels him
[I]f you keep running, wherever you run you will meet danger and evil, for it drives you, it chooses the way you go. You must choose. You must seek what seeks you. You must hunt the hunter….
“A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea. You returned to Gont, you returned to me, Ged. Now turn clean round, and seek the very source, and that which lies before the source. There lies your hope of strength.” (1, p. 128)
This is more than simple Taosim (as if anything in the Tao is simple). It’s pure Jungianism: to become whole, you must face yourself fully and embrace yourself, all parts of yourself. Nothing is more dangerous, nothing more heroic, than that essential self-knowledge, that knowing of one’s own shadow. “The shadow stands on the threshold,” Le Guin writes elsewhere. “We can let it bar the way to the creative depths of the unconscious, or we can let it lead us to them” (3, p. 64). The archetypes come through the shadow. It’s a first step.
Talk about making a metaphor literal: Ged turns to confront his shadow, chasing it across Earthsea and eventually reuniting him with his friend Vetch, who accompanies him in the last stages of his quest, witness and aid. In fact, if Ged chases his shadow, in Vetch he’s brought along his best self, a better version of Ged, as throughout the novel Vetch is the wiser, the kinder, the more compassionate, the more grounded character. No one could be better to have Ged’s back than Vetch.
When Ged finally meet the shadow, as it approaches he sees in it the faces of everyone who has pained him or earned his hate: his father, Jasper, Petchverry or, rather, a combination of Petchverry and his drowned son, Skiorh, and then
a fearful face he did not know, man or monster, with writhing lips and eyes that were like pits going back into black emptiness.
At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow’s name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: “Ged.” And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one. (1, pp. 178-179)
Jung says there is no thing more frightening, no act more heroic, than facing one’s own shadow. No deed can be more difficult than acknowledging—owning—what we hate and fear most about ourselves. And yet, on the path to self-knowledge and individuation, it’s a necessary, and first, step. What kind of being doesn’t cast a shadow? To be whole, to be real, you must own the bad with the good.
I realize this sounds glib and easy. In Jung’s psychology it’s an ongoing struggle, to keep embracing the shadow, to not treat it as a One and Done kind of thing. In real life, it’s also true that most people don’t accomplish it, don’t even try. But fiction, ah, fiction...simplifies, clarifies. Fantasy makes metaphor real.
Therefore, becoming one with the shadow is a satisfying climax to the novel. Ged is a hero not because he’s a dragonlord, or because he can define a boat as a thing that doesn’t leak and make it sail despite that it’s missing half its boards (after all, a thing made of boards in boat-shape is one thing, but a boat is a thing that doesn’t leak, which keeps him from drowning) but because he is brave enough to turn and face himself, because he remembers his Naming, his friendship with Vetch, his apprenticeship to Ogion, because he becomes the stream from its spring to its falling into the sea. He owns his life, the good and the bad, and that, in turn, demonstrates to Vetch
that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, has made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark. (1, pp. 180-181)
A Wizard of Earthsea is a whole novel that turns on one archetype. As an archetype, the shadow is more than a symbol; it’s symbol plus emotion—that’s what archetypes are (all archetypes are symbol and emotion combined). The emotional content generated from all that is deferred, repressed, refused—all that negativity, all that messiness, all the untidy parts of being human—all of that joins to make a powerful examination of this one single archetype.
Of course A Wizard of Earthsea is about much more than an archetype. It’s a coming of age novel, a story of friendship and betrayal, quests and riddles, dragons and dark powers, a world in all its strange and arresting detail, all told in spare, balance, lean and poetic prose. It reads aloud like spun silk. All this past week, while in the country horrible things happened that we couldn’t control, and a few bad things happened closer to home that I couldn’t control but will have to deal with, and all through it I reread A Wizard of Earthsea, for the first time far too many years. The book I loved in my youth has matured very well; in fact, I rather think it’s wasted on a YA audience. Or maybe it gets wiser as we get wiser.
Before the final conflict Ged says of his life, “I was in too much haste, and now have no time left. I traded all the sunlight and the cities and the distant lands for a handful of power, for a shadow, for the dark,” (1, p. 168). After, all he can say is, “It is over. I am whole. I am free,” and he cries (1, p. 180). Vetch believes in his friend’s glorious future, but for himself, Ged wants most of all to see Vetch home where he is loved, and where the ones who have become his family abide. It’s a good place for “a proud, lonely boy in the time before his fame,” as the dust jacket blurbs.
Now that I have, in my own poor way, written a little about the shadow and a little about Ged, next week I would like to pay attention to an obscure but important essay, an essay that’s hard to find but should be much wider read. Found in Le Guin’s own The Language of the Night, “The Child and the Shadow” explores the role of the shadow in fantasy. Until then, happy reading. And if anyone else wants to write about Earthsea, let me know and I’ll clear a slot for you.
References
1. Ursula Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea. New York: Bantam, 1975.
2. Jolande Jacobi, The Psychology of C. G. Jung. New Haven: Yale UP, 1962.
3. Ursula Le Guin, “The Child and the Shadow,” in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Susan Wood. NY: Putnam, 1979, pp. 59-72.