The fermenting underground and the pulsing rose: A Jungian view of the dynamics of tragedy and transcendence in literature.

摘要

This study employs C. G. Jung's Analytical Psychology as a methodological tool for investigating the nature of the archetypal energies which inform and shape literary productions. As such, this study not only discusses the value of the continued applicability of Jung's psychology in the area of literary studies, but also applies his ideas to eight diverse works of literature in order to reveal the dynamic nature of both tragedy and transcendence.;Chapter One offers an overview of Jungian psychology and details the approach that the subsequent chapters will follow.;Chapter Two focuses on William Shakespeare's Macbeth and its dramatization of the profane ritual of bear-baiting: through the process of psychic devolution, the play's title character drops out of the human community to reign briefly and tragically as bear-king in a kingdom of beasts.;Chapter Three examines the masochistic arrogance of ego in Robert Browning's dramatic monologue, "Andrea del Sarto." The poem paints a flawless picture of tragedy's portrait by revealing how lines of self-involvement, self-encapsulation, and self-exclusivity create an ironic and ultimately empty mandala of self-expatriation.;Chapter Four discusses Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Tom Wingfield's unbalanced (re)imagining of memory. As such, he (re)creates a tragic fiction of family from which he feels he must flee: thus enmeshed, Tom sees life only in terms of either/or and dooms himself to repeat the mistakes of the past.;Chapter Six delves into the dramatic monologue, "The Keeper of the Books" by Jorge Luis Borges. The poem presents two conflicting mythical worlds through the split vox of the speaker who elaborates them. In order to reconcile the tension of an imagined, harmonious mythos and its disruptive shadow, the speaker in the poem moves beyond outward signs (because he cannot decode them) and into the heart of the imaginative sphere where creation and destruction are no longer divisive forces.;Chapter Seven concentrates on the archetypal relationship between Robert Frost's "Directive" and the twenty-fourth hexagram, "Fu," in the I Ching. Even though the two works are separated by time and culture, they both depict the trek toward greater conscious awareness. As such, they furnish accounts of the transformation of psychic energy: away from a monistic, fact-encumbered perspective and towards an attitude of return one which allows for the recovery of the symbolic and transcendent dimension of being.;Chapter Eight teases out the imaginal ley-lines in the oneiric territories of Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" and A. R. Ammons' "Terrain." Both poets continue a tradition that began in American literature at least with Washington Irving (if not before): the surveying of psychic environments. Additionally, both Rich and Ammons can be imagined as cartographers of the soul: Rich charts the depths of enlargement and Ammons the breadth of expansion. Each poet-mapper reveals a fluid and transcendental psychic environment which is self-sustaining, self-regulating, and self-propagating.