“The Child and the Shadow,” an important essay by Ursula Le Guin, was first published in April 1975 in the Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 32, and reprinted in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. The volume is currently out of print and ridiculously overpriced (and really should be reissued—HarperCollins, are you listening?) There’s a version of the essay online from Google Books that may or may not be consistently complete — a tip of the hat to linkage for finding it.
If you’re only just joining us, we’ve been discussing Jungian psychology, at first in general and now, in fantasy literature :
And finally, the necessary disclaimer: Not a psychiatrist, not even a pretend psychiatrist. Okay? Let’s go.
Why this essay? Because it’s important. The entire collection The Language of the Night is valuable and useful, as Le Guin lays down many of the essential markers that science fiction and fantasy develop along. Among them, “The Child and the Shadow” is celebrated as one of the first to explore the power inherent in what was at the time considered a minor, oddball, and definitely inferior form of fiction — fantasy. The power she writes about in this essay is the essential power of the shadow as threshold and guide to the creative power of the unconscious.
This is something that really hadn’t been done before, not as Le Guin explained it. For a long time, like Tolkien’s “On Faerie Stories,” “The Child and the Shadow” was relegated to the nursery, as in Tolkien’s analogy of the old furniture that’s not shabby enough to be discarded, but not chic enough to be allowed in the rooms where adults gather.
About the Kids
First things first: the essay is adapted from a talk about children’s literature. Therefore, much of Le Guin’s discussion centers on children, what they read and what writers should offer. At the time she delivered the talk, some forty or fifty years ago now, fantasy was generally considered to be kid lit.
This is of course no longer the case. And much of what Le Guin writes about children’s reading we can sidestep because, although her examples are drawn from children’s literature, her points hold true for all fictions, but especially for fantasy as it developed and came into its own as an art form. And her main point specifically about children is this: kids can handle dark truths; in fact, they often handle them better than adults do.
A kid’s world is inherently different from an adult’s and, as adults, we forget this at our peril. Children exist in a position of powerlessness in a world of shifting mores and requirements: home vs. playground vs. school — all governed by arbitrary rules, shifting alliances and because I said so being all too often the final authority. It’s a world with tremendous potential for injustice, cruelty, and arbitrariness. Add to that mix a child’s unformed sense of consequence and morality, and you get a being that is just as likely to pet and cuddle a frog as she is to smash it with a rock just to see what happens. A being to whom death is an abstraction. A being whose self-regard rivals Narcissus himself. A being scarily similar to an adult, but profoundly different. Le Guin’s point is simple: kids do dark. What they require is an honest dark. They can spot fake a mile away, which is why so many well-meant but pallid Disney-fied reinterpretations of fairy tales fall flat, even as the dark and violent ones remain perennial. Real dark educates. Honest dark leads to wisdom.
Anyway, because the essay is about the Child and the Shadow, Le Guin starts with a literal shadow, in the form of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Shadow.” It’s worth reading, if you want to follow along.
With me so far? Le Guin summarizes the tale, calling it “extraordinarily cruel...a story about insanity, ending in humiliation and death” (1, p. 60). The house across the street is the House of Beauty, the girl the young man loves is Poetry, and the princess who sees too clearly is Reason.
But who are the man and the shadow? That’s not so plain. They aren’t allegorical figures. They are symbolic or archetypal figures, like those in a dream. Their significance is multiple, inexhaustible….The man is all that is civilized — learned, kindly, idealistic, decent. The shadow is all that gets suppressed in the process of becoming a decent, civilized adult. (1, p. 60)
If you hearken back to the discussion of Ged and his shadow from two weeks ago, this reading from the same author is consistent. The man who cuts himself off from his instinctive self, his dark self, the man who won’t recognize that shadow within himself, can’t act — he can’t enter the House of Beauty, he can’t approach Poetry: “he has cut himself off at the roots. And the shadow is equally helpless; it can’t get past the shadowy anteroom to the light. Neither of them, without the other, can approach the truth” (1, p. 61).
The scholar gets another chance in his middle years, but fails, letting the darker part of himself become his master. And that leads directly to his death.
Interesting story, when you strip away the fairy tale conceits; it becomes a “bitter, complex study of a moral failure” (p. 61).
Le Guin writes that as a child, she hated the story of the shadow. Her hatred of it didn’t stop her from reading, and rereading it, because — let’s say it all together — kids can do dark.
I had somewhat less conscious mind than I have now. But I had as much, or more, of an unconscious mind, and was perhaps in better touch with it than I am now. And it was to that, to the unknown depths in me, that the story spoke; and it was the depths which responded to it and, nonverbally, irrationally, understood it, and learned from it. (p. 62)
As Neil Gaiman (himself no stranger to archetypes) wrote, These stories have power.
Le Guin’s “daylight/rational” reading of “The Shadow” asserts that, unless an artist confronts evil and darkness, that artist will not produce art. Art needs depth, it needs shadows, it need the recognition that not all is sweetness. Power is found in the dark, and to use it, the artist must be whole. Then she turns to Jung. And here, she says, the ego, the conscious self, has a choice. Either it must reach out and identify with the external world or face “the hopeless silence of autism.” If all the ego is offered is junk, it’ll consume “such things as cults, creeds, fads, fashions, status-seeking, conventions, received beliefs, advertising, popcult, all the isms, all the ideologies, all the hollow forms of communication or real sharing.” To escape this fate, the creative ego turns inward, “it must identify with its own deeper regions, the great unexplored regions of the Self,” a.k.a. the unconscious. It is there, “where we all meet, that he [Jung] sees the source of true community; of felt religion; of art, grace, spontaneity, and love” (p. 63). The true source of strength is within, down at the base of everything where we’re all connected to each other. To go out, you first must go in; to be open to the universe, first you must open up to the Self. To go up, like Dante, you must first go down, to the depths, to the bottom of the pit. Only then can you come out the other side and begin your ascent.
Interestingly, Le Guin notes that Jung is particularly interested in the second half of life, “when this conscious confrontation with a shadow that’s been growing for thirty or forty years can become imperative—as it did for the poor fellow in the Andersen story” (p. 65). This confrontation is the one that we try to escape through mid-life crises, with all their convertibles, bungee-jumping, self-destructive and relationship-shredding behaviors: the looming presence of mortality, the coming to terms with the fact that one life is all we get, that it’s finite, and that we have to come to terms with it. Here the shadow is our guide, and incorporating our shadows lets us master our knowledge of life in all its complications, all its ambiguities, all its … wholeness. “The guide of the journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood, to the light.”
This is, after all, the great burden of life: growing up, growing old, being mortal. Interestingly, we tend to regard our shadows as other early in life, and by othering them, we make them darker and more evil than they really are. With maturity, as we come to accept our shadow selves, they guide us to wisdom — knowledge of the world, knowledge of self, and the wisdom to discern between. That journey of acceptance and incorporation is the one that Ged makes, that Andersen’s scholar fails to make:
It also seems to me that most of the great works of fantasy are about that journey; and that fantasy is the medium best suited to a description of that journey, its perils and rewards. The events of a voyage into the unconscious are not describable in the language of rational daily life: only the symbolic language of the deeper psyche will fit them without trivializing them.
Moreover, the journey seems to be not only a psychic one, but a moral one. Most great fantasies contain a very strong, striking moral dialectic, often expressed as a struggle between the Darkness and the Light. But that makes it sound simple, and the ethics of the unconscious—of the dream, the fantasy, the fairy tale—are not simple at all. They are, indeed, very strange.” (pp. 65-66)
Good and evil are not diametrically opposed, but rather conjoined. Frodo and Gollum as his shadow — guide, enemy, enabler; Arial and Caliban, Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, Osserc and Rake, Harry and Voldemort. You can’t separate them, and their relationship is complex, intertwined.
The hero or heroine is the one who sees what is appropriate to be done, because he or she sees the whole, which is greater than either evil or good. Their heroism is, in fact, their certainty. They do not act by rules; they simply know the way to go. (pp. 66-67)
In their certainty, Le Guin says, these heroes are guided by instinct. She quotes Marie-Louise von Franz in noting only one consistent rule applies to heroes: whoever is good to animals eventually wins. The animal in fantasy is a guide, a shadow of the hero. It’s also an instinctive creature, much like the individual’s shadow; it doesn’t distinguish between right and wrong, but sees with clarity, the same kind of clarity that the hero must achieve.
I doubt that that’s all there is to it—or that any Jungian would pretend it was. Neither rational thought nor rational ethics can “explain” these deep strange levels of the imagining mind. Even in merely reading a fairy tale, we must let go our daylight convictions and trust ourselves to be guided by dark figures, in silence; and when we come back, it may be very hard to describe where we have been. (p. 67)
Le Guin argues that the conscious adoption of the “good vs. evil” dichotomy leads to “false fantasy.” You might call it the D&Dification of fantasy. It’s too simple, too stark, and Le Guin argues that it fails because “the author has tried to force reason to lead him where reason cannot go, and has abandoned the faithful and frightening guide he should have followed, the shadow” (p 67). Less J.R.R. Tolkien and more Terry Brooks. Speaking of Tolkien, she uses him as an example, admitting that Tolkien’s good guys tend to be really good and the bad guys, well—generally irredeemable. However,
When you look at the story as a psychic journey, you see something quite different, and very strange. You see then a group of bright figures, each one with its black shadow. Against the Elves, the Orcs. Against Aragorn, the Black Rider. Against Gandalf, Saruman. And above all, against Frodo, Gollum. Against him—and with him. (p. 68)
She goes on to note that Frodo and Gollum have their own set of shadows—Sam and Smeagol, which makes for very complicated interpretations, indeed. In the final confrontation, goodness fails, and it’s Gollum who returns the Ring, “the archetype of the Integrative Function, the creative-destructive” to the volcano, “the primal fire.” Looked at it from this point of view, it’s not really a story of good versus evil, but something else entirely, as the wounded Frodo survives to bear witness. “It is a fantasy,” Le Guin writes, “because fantasy is the natural, the appropriate, language for the recounting of the spiritual journey and the struggle of good and evil in the world” (p. 68).
The struggle between good and evil, caught up in all its complexity and intertwined subtlety, escapes—has to escape—a simplistic morality. Good doesn’t always triumph, but neither does evil, and pretending that the white hats have a natural edge over the black hats ignores that both sides shade into each other. That kind of wisdom is hard won, it is a “wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice” (p. 70). Returning to the subject of children, Le Guin says it’s the job of writers and teachers to give children the gift of reality, not just the exterior reality, but more importantly, the interior one:
He needs to face himself and the shadow he casts. That is something he can face, his own shadow; and he can learn to control it and to be guided by it. So that, when he grows up into his strength and responsibility as an adult in society, he will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what he sees, when he must face the evil that is done in the world, and the injustices and grief and suffering that we all must bear, and the final shadow at the end of all. (p. 70)
This ultimate reality, the reality of the psyche: it might seem strange that Le Guin designates fantasy as the likeliest vehicle to teach the reality of the self, but it’s part of the paradox at the heart of fiction: fiction is a dream that speaks essential truth, and more clearly than history or nonfiction, both of which are subject to their authors’ viewpoints. Truth surpasses fiction; truth lives at its very core, as every writer knows. You cannot write fiction and lie—your own words will expose you; the reality you weave will be hollow, inauthentic, unreal, and your readers will smell it out.
There we have it. Not at all difficult. Just like life—take it a step at a time, and you’ll surprise yourself with how far you can go.
Reference
All quotations from 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.