Jung and the Novel - Alice's Masque

After The Magus by John Fowles, I think Alice's Masque and Chymical Wedding are two of the most brilliant books written from a psychological perspective similar to Jung's concepts of symbols, transformation, and individuation leading to an authentic self.  I was riveted with this novel, the impact of the swan, incredibly personal since it's been my totem animal since the 1970's.
Strong, complex and mysterious, Alice's Masque, first published in 1994,  is a compelling story which circles in and around itself capturing the reader in a depth experience. Clarke's language is lush and mysterious, dressed in the harshness of the Cornish coastline. I read this insightful  novel many years ago and it figures in the Top Ten books which changed my life deeply, I'm reading it again. Alice's Masque embraces the English fascination with the Middle Ages, knights and monks, ladies of queenly natures who, wise, by way of observation, when encountered, may summon a seeker to the inner quest, which proves more of a test than the outward journeys of the Crusades


And this was at the height of English post-modern fiction from the likes of Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt and more.
While Alice's Masque was first in the novels of transformation written by Clarke and has the same feel, it is in fact, quite a different story told in a different way.  It starts with three women at the seaside in Yorkshire, in a wild and beautiful area and the theme harkens back to the concept of the Courts of Love from the Middle Ages, when women were to judge for crimes against the heart. Seventy year old Alice, a weaver and astrologer taught Medieval Studies at the university level  before she shocked everyone her affair with a younger man so withdrew form society, first with her lover and then alone, where she becomes a well known artist and weaver.  I won't say much more because I hate to reveal plots.  As with movies, I want to be surprised at almost every curve and shift in a movie.
But I will say, this novel is quite different because as it's told from the viewpoint from Alice we have a rather unique perspective due to her age and experience. There are few boundaries in this novel, which can be cruel and brutal as often as it is touching and poignant.  And the blur of boundaries often takes place between reality, dreams and active imagination.
It's odd that while reading this book, someone sent me a link to Psychology Today and there was an article on the Highly Sensitive Persons  HSPs which has been researched a good bit over the past five or ten years.   This is a rather new typology, a subset of the introvert with slightly different characteristics.
A the recent article, Time Magazine: "The Power of (Shyness)" and High Sensitivity
first published in Time and then reprinted in Psychology Today which referenced an earlier  Psychology Today article,  "Sense and Sensibility,"  from 1969 you can see the research has been going on for a while.

"Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatrist at Tufts University best known for his dream research. Around the same time, he was solidifying the concept of boundaries as a dimension of personality and way of experiencing the world. Life, he observes, is made up of boundaries—between past and present, you and me, subject and object. And people differ in the way they embody and perceive boundaries.
In his schema, people with thin mental boundaries do not clearly separate the contents of consciousness, so that a fantasy life of daydreaming may bump right up against everyday reality. It's as if those with thin boundaries have porous shells that allow more of their environment to penetrate and "get" to them—and into their dreams, Hartmann's concept of the thin-boundaried seemed to suggest that there indeed exists a group of people who take in a whole lot more than others.

 Today, science is validating a group of people whose sensitivity surfaces in many domains of life. Attuned to subtleties of all kinds, they have a complex inner life and need time to process the constant flow of sensory data that is their inheritance. 
 Highly sensitive people are all around us. They make up about 20 percent of the population, and likely include equal numbers of men and women. All the available evidence suggests they are born and not made.

This description totally explains an elderly person of an HSPs nature.
 And I can attest to that myself being one. All my life, I've been told to get my head out of the clouds (I was in a fantasy almost all day through school and then through much of my failed marriage) but now I see there was no way I could.  It's just how I was genetically programmed from birth and further pushed by the death of my father when I was five. Once I started writing I mined that world on the other side of a very slim veil for poetry and novels but just within the past year, I've noticed my dream life now invades my awake life, without any active imagination on my own.  Images just break through, more often when I'm alone, reading, but they have nothing to do with the subject matter of the book.  It happens more often than not now, everyday and often I am able to participate in a dream and change it while I'm still asleep or half asleep.  It's often hard to tell, they seem the same world at times.
Much  of Alice's Masque is like this from the first shocking pivotal events, through a brutal crime on the beach, and a manhunt, to lovers testing, chasing, thwarting and hurting each other, when all they want to do is open up and be authentic. And there is one way, slowly revealed through a series of bizarre experiences and encounters.  Ultimately its a story about finding one's true self, no matter what the world expects. For HSPs, this can be quite difficult, especially for men.  Yet each character in this novel appears to be of this type especially the author who must be one himself  
More from Psychology Today,  "The Highly Sensitive Person has always been part of the human landscape. There's evidence that many creative types are highly sensitive, perceiving cultural currents long before they are manifest to the mainstream, able to take in the richness of small things others often miss.
This is an especially important book, take Fowles word on it, but also for those 20% (many who I imagine are readers) of the HSPs nature, it can be a revealing book which makes one feel less freaky, less out of touch, less isolated, especially in a time when nonfiction books such as Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking, are finally educating the public on who we are.  Funny how this novel helped to "set the stage" in 1994. 

Jung's influence on the Novel - a plan

I've devised a new plan of study which I think will be highly entertaining and enlightening for me as a novelist (attempting to finish two novels and edit another.)
 I can't believe I've never though of it before. But it will be a study of novels influenced by Jung o the type of thought Jung taught. The idea came to me thanks to an amazing confluence of events, books, music influences brings the spiral around to one of those pivotal transitory times.  In the past few weeks, I've attended the Jung webinar on the film, A Dangerous Method, read a ton of books on Jung and by Jung, taken my granddaughter to art shows, cello concerts and have just had fun playing with her and her Monster High collection - all circling around, as Jung liked to do in his writings to view a concept from every possible angle.  Of course, with me the astrological and alchemical aspects are always flitting through my mind as I dive in and then attempt to stand back and observe. Books are once again fining their way to me after being referenced in some other, sometimes obscure volume and some quite by accident. New authors and old friends.  So now I also have a cache of Jungian style novels waiting for me even as I attempt to catalog and perhaps review the many in the past I've enjoyed and the particular stand outs (most notably, The Magus by John Fowles (unrevised edition - by far what I consider the best novel using Jungian approaches ever written - the novel which changed my life and which I read every year), Cymical Wedding and Alice's Masque by Lindsey Clarke in addition to The Virgin in the Garden and a number of other books by A.S. Byatt, not to mention books by Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing. These all led, or sometimes even shoved, me onto my own particular journey into Jungian though and my own subconscious.  It helps that my dreams are cooperating as well, and I've once again started a dream journal, which I'd out away for a number of years.
The books I have waiting for me at the moment are Lindsay Clarke's, The Water Theatre, Timothy Findley's,  Pilgrim (where Jung is an actual character in the book) and Powder Dreams by David Ward-Nanney, where one the characters enters analysis, a topic which often defies description).   
Reviews and perhaps comparisons to come.

Art shorthand as character triggers

Eventful weekends are not only inspiring my writing, but helping me to get out of hermit mode. The Art Bomb, a group of art studios where some of the most innovative local artists work, once again had one of their rare shows in their renovated historic building in Greenville, SC.
 Often one or two of the pieces I see at Art Bomb shows will infiltrate my imagination and end up in in my writing. 
The pieces are owned or viewed by my characters. In Shaman Circus, two characters are artists.  Mavis, the Katrina survivor is a painter, and Lily is a painter  who also  creates 3-d sculptures in copper and pottery. 
 I thugged this concept from my favorite author, John Fowles, whose character, Nick in the The Magus, visits a house on the Greek island of Phraxos. The house's charismatic and mysterious owner, Conchis traveled the world and owns  large valuable art collection. However, among, all the paintings, Nick is drawn to the Bonnards.
When I first read The Magus, I was unschooled in art. I was young and foolish, and didn't bother to look up the artwork, but years later, after about my 5th or 6th read, knowing the painter and his subject matter (nude and semi nude women in the boudoir or bath) added layers to the scene. Fowles used the painting, instead of words to speak volumes for those who knew Bonnard's work.
Granted some of the pieces I mention are not internationally known yet, but I believe they will be or should be. my character's reactions to the art, is another way for me to do characterization, even character development. I call this technique art shorthand.
 Twice these have been pieces by Greg Flint, but the artists there always offer something which challenges my preconceptions about art and writing, which then filters into my characters mindset. For instance, a piece I own of Greg's and its message of the hero's journey is incorporated in Shaman in Exile. The piece and it's meanings are touchstones throughout the entire book, reflecting one of the main themes. The characters refer to it over and over again, and even carry symbols of it as a talisman. A second a piece I drooled over but which was eventually bought by someone else inspired parts of Fireworks, Interference Equation. 
I know a lot of you who are writers already use music to augment your atmospheres, what your characters listen to hum or play, but don't forget art.  Look at your favorite pieces and see what they tell you.  They may tell your characters something as well, who will turn around and tell your readers, thereby  making your writing richer, deeper, multi-layered.
I'm curious, who of you out there have used art in your writing....and how?


 

Magical Realism III

Magical Realism III


So my personal journey into the hypnotic world of magical realism came through the British, came when I first read W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. After reading the book I was enthralled with the concepts and Hudson’s audacity to allow the magical world to encroach on the real world. For years I searched for other such experiences in the literary world. I wasn’t writing much at the time, mostly a weekly column for a local town newspaper, but I was hooked and the idea of creating and populating such real places with magical aspects took hold. But, I couldn’t find many other novels like Green Mansions. So, like with much of my writing, I tried to write the experience I wanted to encounter. I was unsuccessful at the first three novel attempts.

Then I read The Magus by British author, John Fowles. A book which touched me so powerfully, I read it at least once a year, and have given more than 30 copies of the book to other writers, poets and artists in the hope it will inspire them to believe anything is possible as it inspired me. Many papers and discussions on magical realism list The Collector by Fowles as his only magical realism book. But I disagree. Fowles, himself considered The Magus his magical realism novel (as he noted in the revised edition’s intro) and I wonder if the writers who include The Collector in their magical realism lists have actually read the book. I have a feeling they’re instead citing the title from previous publications or essays. To me The Collector is far from the field of magical realism as it doesn’t contain some of the most imperative aspects of this misinterpreted literary style.

When I undertook to write Shaman Circus, it was going to be a dark fantasy novel, but as it shifted and changed, by its own direction, magical elements crept in: ritual and carnival, political uneasiness and tragedy in both the community and in many personal lives, struggles between the established civilized order and the spiritual needs of a population very different form the rest of the US, and then there’s the magic in everyday life – the means to help people cope with events too big for the mind to grasp. Small everyday ways to be able to breathe when overwhelmed. The story evolved because of what the characters could or could not do. There was too much realism for fantasy and I wanted there to be hope and healing in the face of the horrors. I didn’t follow any format for magical realism and didn’t even realize it fell in that realm until three years after I’d finished the first draft and a couple of revisions. Previously I’d written some literary pieces, but mostly dark fantasy and psychological horror. So this was a switch. Most of it must have been subconscious. I only realized it fell in that character when trying to write the synopsis to seek publication. Strange things indeed.

And things they are a-changing again…

When I started searching on Duotrope – (an online data base and submission tracker of over 2700 print and online magazines) for publications which accepted magical realism fiction a couple of years ago, very few magazines opted to publish such stories. Now each day brings new magazines venturing into this often confused and not fully understood territory and a lot more of them came onboard within the last few months.

So you do the math…

What is Magical Realism?

What is Magical Realism - part I

Over the next few blog entries, I'm going to discuss the style of magical realism.  It's an illusive term, often confused and misinterpreted and I have my own interpretation to add.  It's not necessarily a scholarly one, but a personal approach, launched by all the books I've read since the mid 1970's that seem to fit the term.

As an intersting sidenote, Jennifer Mattison, a literary agent with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency,has written an entry on her website predicitng magical realism may be a field mined for the next big thing in YA books.While I don't write YA books, I find this interesting since the YA and adult markets often cross-reference. So you might want to check out her opinion.

so off we go on this magical mystery ride...
What is Magical Realism?

a very brief overview...

Readers may ask what is magical realism. This literary style conjures authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, thanks to Venezuelan, Arturo Uslar-Pietri who adopted the term. He used it to describe the work of  particular Latin American writers who wrote in a vivid style laced with folklore and the acceptance of magic in the everyday world.

.However, the term – magic realism - was coined many decades earlier in the writings of a German art historian. At the same time, in a Jungian synchronistic way, separately and without communication, an Italian magazine editor mentioned the term.

“Franz Roh in the 1920’s presented magic realism as a reaction to expressionism, and independently in the Italian journal Novecento, edited by writer and critic Massimo Bontempelli. It was adopted during the 1940's by Latin American authors who combined the theories of Roh and Bontempelli with French surrealist concepts of the marvelous, and incorporated indigenous mythologies within traditional mimetic conventions in their quest for the original Latin American novel. From the 1960's to the present, there has been a strong current of magic realism within the general movement of post-modernism, especially in British and North American literature.” -- the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

And while magical realism started out to first describe paintings following the expressionist period, when it turned to fiction, the shift was dramatic and took on more momentum in literature than it had in art. Franz Kafka, one of the first authors to be labeled with the term, was followed in later decades by English authors, W.H. Hudson and John Fowles in the humanist-realist 50’s movement, also called 'historiographic metafiction. This was also linked to late modernism's experimentalism, and then later with the 'fabulation' of authors such as Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie.

Granted, many changes and terms were thrown around in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s following the period of the deconstruction of the novel and dramatic new swings in all of the arts.  Latin American novels, along with the works of the likes of Rushdie brought magical realism to the bestseller racks and a renewed curiousity from the general reading public.

to be continued....

In the next section I'll discuss the various elements often found in magical realism which sets it apart form straight literay or genre fiction.

Influences and the Subconscious in Writing

Inspired in part by the blog of writer, B. Miller on what happens when we write in the zone...

Influences… influences. A writer doesn’t develop in a vacuum. Even if as we set out to tell our story, our influences will creep into our work, through word play, plot structure, characterization. As novice writers we may start out mimicking those authors we admire, but eventually through struggle and attention we grow beyond the copycat stage.


However, our subconscious is a very powerful force. The authors we admired were probably the reason we wanted to write in the first place. So their influence may be even more powerful than we think. Their voices, word choices, and styles creep in… without our knowledge, without our permission, perhaps even to the point of an exact phrase.

After those in-the-zone times when the story writes itself and we can’t type fast enough, we stand back hardly remembering the process – that’s our subconscious. Weeks,and months before, our subconscious worked out the details based on many factors which are part of us, but are deep below the surface. We may not recognize our favorite authors’ hands in our work until months or years later. But as in my writers group, we can point out when it happens to each other. Brian can spot Fowles in my work; I can spot Tosches on his. I spot Stephen King in Becky’s writing and I’d actually feel grateful if she could spot Poppy Z Brite’s in mine.

Eventually we develop our own voice with just a hint of our influences as we merge and meld the various styles of the authors we read over and over. We imprint our own mark which rises to the surface of its own accord.

I write the books I want to read but can’t find. Perhaps they haven’t been written yet, or not enough of them for my personal hunger. So it becomes my job. To write those missing books.

Shaman Circus is one such book. It some ways it’s an amalgamation of styles from my favorite authors, but not as much as I’d like. I wrote it after a period of writing short stories and didn’t intend to write a novel, but the characters took hold and the subjects were too important for me to handle with brevity. Simmering in my gullet were all the news clips and personal stories I heard regarding Katrina and New Orleans, my 2nd favorite place in the world after Hampton Village, NH.

I started the story as a tale of shamanism, a subject I had researched for years and was researching a good bit at the time. When I started writing it, the main location was not New Orleans, and the main character was the protagonist, Alex Hampton. But the character I originally assigned as the antagonist, Jacob LaGuerre, hijacked the story and took it where he wanted it to be played out – the tortured landscape of New Orleans. Sure I’d had a lot to say about the Katrina aftermath, but I wasn’t ready to tackle such a subject in a short story, let alone a full length novel. But Jacob is more adventurous and driven than I am, and he hijacked me as well.

Yet you may still find my influences. To me the story is not written in the style I’d most like to write. It’s not lush with metaphors, it’s not as many layered as I’d like. But after a heyday of writing for me in the early 90’s, I went to work as a photojournalist at the local newspaper and it killed my writing style, beat it into the dust. After I left the newspaper, it took me years of flat and failed short stories to relearn how to write fiction.

I’m not ashamed of those influences showing up – to me it’s more like a homage (even when they're unconscious), much like many filmmakers do with a nod to their teachers, their mentors, directors such as George Lucas, Alex Pyros, or Stephen Speilberg.

So I don’t mind if my influences make brief cameos in my writing, – a bit of John Fowles, Poppy Z Brite, Caitlin Kiernan and hints of Neil Gaiman. They are some of the writers who swept me away.