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Ø 2012 Susan Rowland

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The ecocritical psyche : literature, evolutionary complexity, and Jung /Susan Rowland.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-0-415-55093-2 (hardback) ± ISBN 978-0-415-55094-9 (pbk.) 1.

Psychoanalysis and literature. 2. Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav), 1875-1961. 3.Ecology in literature. 4. Ecocriticism. I. Title.

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Contents

Preface viii

Acknowledgements xiii

1 Introduction 1

2 The problem of the body in/out of nature for Jane Austenand Seamus Heaney 26

3 The problem of Heaven and Hell for Emily Bronte 50

4 Re-®guring evolution for children's literature 76

5 Hunting signs with the trickster detectives 101

6 Shakespeare's magical power 127

7 The writer and the underworld 154

Glossary 173

References 178

Index 185



Chapter 1

Introduction

The problem of writing and nature for Jung andevolution

Introduction

A psychologist, C. G. Jung was acutely aware of the dif®culty of writingabout nature. To him, the unconscious is how non-human nature inhabitshuman beings. Unfortunately, the non-human and the unknown psyche areterritories resistant to everyday language.

Here is an example of Jung's use of nature as a simile, a kind of meta-phor using `like' or às':

The moment one forms an idea of a thing. . . One has taken possessionof it, and it has become an inalienable piece of property, like a slaincreature of the wild that can no longer run away.

(Jung 1947/1954/1960, CW8: para. 356)

Jung is looking at the nature of the psyche and how it can be captured inwriting. After all, to write about the psyche is to fall into a trap. Only thepsyche itself, meaning all the properties of the human mind, conscious andunconscious, can re¯ect upon the psyche. There is no standpoint outside thepsyche from which to view it with scienti®c detachment. If there is a natureof the psyche, it is one in which we are always enmeshed.

The metaphor of the slain creature of the wild says more than thatpsychologists stalk the psyche from within. Like all metaphors it is acomparison that problematizes as well as likens. Here the various parts ofthe metaphor are the ìdea of a thing', ìnalienable piece of property', and`slain creature of the wild'. The metaphor spans the meaning making aboutpsyche (idea), culture (property) and nature (creature). To seize upon ade®nitive idea about the psyche is to grasp it proprietarily. Such a greedymanoeuvre is equivalent to killing a wild animal that has no means ofescape.

What is striking about this metaphor is the link it makes between controlof meaning and despoliation of the natural world. In this, it represents aprofound insight that is more than ecological; it is ecocritical, in the sense of



the body of criticism and theory that addresses how literature carves up theworld into `natural' and `cultural' categories. Ecocriticism will be intro-duced later in this chapter. Here it is worth noting Jung's sensitivity towriting as a process by which apparently abstract ideas about truth arebound up with cultural claims about power. To raid the psyche in the formof claiming an idea as secure and fully known, to claim ownership of apsychic idea, does two things. It slaughters then proclaims that the deadcreature represents some psychic truth. To imagine that one knows some-thing absolutely about psychic nature is to stake one's claim to a dead land.

Not only is this fragment of Jung packed with ecocritical possibilities; italso exposes key issues within his own theory and even within the ®eld ofnature and writing itself. For Jung, it expresses his most fundamentalattitude to knowledge (Jung 1947/1954/1960, CW8: para. 358). He believedthat the unconscious part of the psyche was intrinsically creative, and atleast in part could never be known by the rational faculty of the mind. Inthis way the psyche could be compared to a wilderness with its ownindigenous wild creatures. Claiming absolute knowledge of this fertile placeviolates its essential independence from the conscious ego. Therefore, toassume that an aspect of the ego can completely apprehend the wildunconscious converts a wilderness into something more like a museum ofstuffed animals.

Over and over again it will be this element of Jung that will proveinvaluable to The Ecocritical Psyche. It is the notion of the creative mysteryharboured in the human psyche that gives us a route to re-thinking ourrelations with nature and literature. Jung will offer a framework forcreating meaning that can respect the vital, vitalizing otherness of nature.This last sentence takes us to issues of language that are crucial to eco-criticism as discussed below: When is a metaphor not a metaphor? Is theslain creature of the wild an image representing psychic life? Or, if it is notalways a metaphor, can it suggest that we have a psychic link to wildanimals? Could it suggest that the culture of capitalism and property is notso much like killing creatures but does, in fact, kill them?

An argument that will become crucial to The Ecocritical Psyche is thatfor Jung something extraordinary happens to writing and images thatevokes the deep unconscious. Such cultural signs ± Jung calls them symbols± are so imbued with psychic energy that they burn through the systems ofcommunication we believe keep human language separate from nature.Rather, the Jungian symbol gestures towards ecocritical and scienti®ctheories that nature speaks to us through the body and the imagination.This book is dedicated to showing how Jung's work can aid a revisioning ofhuman creativity as coeval with non-human reality.

Fundamental to this possibility is Jung's insistence that the unconsciousis where human nature is intrinsically embedded in non-human nature(ibid.: para. 412). Humans are born as part of the natural world and create

2 Writing and nature for Jung and evolution



culture through socialization and by developing a fruitful relationship withnature in their unconscious (see discussion on ìndividuation' below). Sowhat happens in the slain creature metaphor is that it is a device thatdevelops substance: to control meaning is to be greedy for possession itself,such as in killing a wild being.

This is one aspect of metaphor familiar in writing where somethingcrucial cannot be known. I will compare Jung's desire to structure a net ofmeaning, one that locates but does not kill the wild creature, with a verysimilar process in the writing of Charles Darwin. Writing about the psyche,Jung tells us, is a quest, not a conquest. The writer must track stealthily andlet the psychic animals escape alive. It will be Darwin who will report asimilar experience in writing about nature.

Introducing ecocriticism

Ecocriticism is a branch of literary studies that puts a critical focus on therelationship between culture and nature in a textual context. It containswithin it a number of tensions and debates. For some ecocritics theseinclude the rejection of the term `nature' itself as too ideologically satur-ated. The Ecocritical Psyche takes the contrary view. I will suggest thatinfusing the political drive of the word `nature' is a mythical substrate thatembodies an òtherness' to culture. Such deeply repressed material is notonly worth excavating but is indeed necessary to cultural and psychicchange.

Moreover, ecocriticism wrestles with the question of what is `natural' inproducts of the imagination. Could all examples of artistic media exhibit aconnection to the environment? In such a framework, a plastic sculpture ina white-painted gallery could be read critically for its earthless disguise ofultimately raw materials. By this attitude, all literature throughout historyhas some sort of link, even if it is in denial, to non-human nature.

An important response to the possible all pervasiveness of ecocriticism isto stress its critical edge. Certainly the resurgence of polemical writingabout nature and literature owes much to the publication of The Eco-criticism Reader edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in 1996.Part of its development included the setting up of the Association for theStudy of Literature and the Environment and ISLE (InterdisciplinaryStudies in Literature and Environment), a new academic journal for eco-criticism. Cheryll Glotfelty's introduction to the Reader includes a furtheraspect to ecocriticism after issues about scope and a critical slant.

Ecocriticism expands the notion of ``the world'' to include the entireecosphere. If we agree with Barry Commoner's ®rst law of ecology,`Èverything is connected to everything else,'' we must conclude thatliterature does not ¯oat above the material world in some aesthetic

Writing and nature for Jung and evolution 3



ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex, global system,in which energy, matter, and ideas, interact.

(Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: xix)

Ecocriticism makes demands beyond concerns with literary texts. Inparticular, ecocriticism challenges the assumption that literature is a self-suf®cient entity. Rather, what is inherent in virtually all ecocriticism is thenotion that literature, like all cultural modes, cannot be wholly separatedfrom the non-human world. Moreover, in that literature is currently part ofa culture that is destroying itself by eroding non-human essential sources ofsustenance, studying literature might help us to understand, and evenreverse, exploitation of the environment.

William Rueckert, who coined the term `ecocriticism' in 1978, expressesin The Ecocriticism Reader a potent way of regarding literature as part ofthe ecosystem of life on the planet:

A poem is stored energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl inthe ¯ow. Poems are part of the energy pathways which sustain life.

(Rueckert 1978/1996: 108)

In this notion of ecocriticism, the role of the critic may be to analyseliterature, but also to see the activity as co-extensive with ecological cam-paigning. Ecocriticism may mean volunteering to protect a wilderness areaas well as writing a scholarly article. However, Rueckert's wonderfulevocative phrases also return us to the problem of language and nature.

In fact, both Glotfelty and Rueckert are making the important assump-tion, to which I will return frequently in this book, that language iscorporeal, of the body. It is important because much of literary theoryargues that language is a system that is ultimately self-referential: it is notconnected to anything outside itself. Although some literature claims torepresent `the world', or `nature', such claims are a fallacy to literary criticswho assume that language is exclusively culture.

What such critics fail to consider are ideas of language rooted in thebody. Implied in such a ®guring of language are notions of signifying as notbeing an exclusively human property after all. Animals call to each other,yet we do not credit them with language. Do they use sounds and gesturessymbolically to share their lives? Do plants communicate? The EcocriticalPsyche will consider new research that opens up questions of creativity andmeaningful signifying in nature. Here Jung's ethical vision of the slaincreature again has something to teach. What if the creature talked back?

Behind some of these debates is a deep ambiguity about human beings ascreatures within a natural environment. Are we hairless apes who haveforgotten our origins? Or, is the retention of the culturally constructedbinary `nature or culture' necessary to remind ourselves of the uniquely




destructive impact of humanity upon a planet earth that does not `belong'exclusively to us?

The philosopher Kate Soper provides an invaluable context to the symp-tomatic ambiguity of our `nature'. She analyses the three ways the term`nature' appears in everyday use (Soper 1995/2000). One expresses the all-encompassing embrace. `The laws of nature' became ingrained in thescienti®c picture of reality from the time of Isaac Newton (1643±1727).His Philosophiñ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, didthe groundwork for most of classical mechanics. Here Newton described thelaws of nature as gravity and the three laws of motion. Such an under-standing of the universe portrayed it as fundamentally stable yet withoutintrinsic ànimation' of its own. This version of cosmic `nature' dominatedthe scienti®c view of the physical universe for the next three centuries.

So as far as `nature' in `the laws of nature' goes, human beings are ®rmlysituated within it. We are as subject to gravity as is everything else. On theother hand, as Soper is well aware, `nature' is often used in a binary senseas meaning òther' to culture. Indeed, we often de®ne what constituteshuman culture as that which falls outside nature. Trees are nature; the shipsmade from them are culture. The raw materials of food are natural, yet ®nedining is culture. This either/or construction of nature versus culture is animportant survival of a very fundamental tendency to structure humansociety in oppositions. It is a basic structuring principle that has been builtinto the architecture of modern Western society. Unsurprisingly, eco-criticism interrogates the binary thinking that designates nature as òther'to culture.

Importantly, the binary form of nature versus culture is far from alone.Rather it is mapped onto, and bound up with, a whole series of binaryoppositions in Western thinking such as God/Man, Masculine/Feminine,Master/Slave, Conscious/Unconscious, and Mind/Body. All these binariesare expressed in human society and arguably could be said to structure it.Historically, one half of the binary was regarded as valuable andproductive, the other half as inferior and incapable of generating `her' ownmeaning.

Hence, in the nexus of semantic relationships that distinguish naturefrom culture is an inherited set of assumptions from the related binaries.Nature here, as òther' to culture, is also feminine, in subordination to themasculine, without divine inspiration, and is unconscious, without rationalproperties. Moreover `she' is merely a `body' severed from `mind', and iseven sometimes portrayed as a mechanical instrument. What nature is notin this binary system is creative, inspired, capable of rationality, masculine,sacred or in-spirited.

Just as some ecocriticism challenges the legacy of the binaries in thissecond understanding of nature, so will The Ecocritical Psyche explore thepossibilities of extending ideas of the unconscious in/as nature to include




inspired language. In particular, the binary accepted by some literarytheorists, that of language versus nature, requires scrutiny. For the notionof nothing outside textuality, no signifying possible from nature on her own,is quite evidently a retention of dualistic thinking, and thus may harm theecological cause.

To end this introduction to ecocriticism, I come to Soper's third use ofthe word `nature'. Here we have nature as picturesque. This is the nature wegaze upon and admire. It is the beautiful landscape that we want topreserve. Two considerations are important to this understanding of thissense of nature. One is that it is the non-human converted into humanaesthetics. We want to save this `nature' because it is delightful to lookupon. Nature is like an exquisite painting or marvellous statute. `She' hasno life, nor ethical existence of `her' own. Nature treated as art is to absorbthe wilderness into the trope of gardening. It is not eco-logic in the sense ofseeing the essential interconnectedness of humans, culture and non-humannature.

Such is the inheritance of nature in modern society. We possess threeoverlapping yet not compatible notions of universal laws, of structures ofothering and privileging, and of the reduction of nature to spectacle. It isthe task of ecocriticism to explore this legacy while remembering the urgentcontext of crisis in the biosphere. Can ecocriticism as a critical re-visionhelp us relate to nature differently? The rest of this chapter will attempt toanswer this question.

To begin, I want to look at Charles Darwin's (1809±1882) seminalnineteenth-century work on the science of nature, On the Origin of Species(1859). He, after all, was attempting a revolution in the understanding ofthe origins of humanity.

Charles Darwin and the problem of writing aboutnature

Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) offers in its analysis of On the Origin ofSpecies a remarkable exposition of the literary qualities that Darwin foundvital to scienti®c writing. In the ®rst place it shows Darwin's growingawareness that discourse cannot be expunged from science (Beer 1983: 46).By `discourse' is meant the way language is saturated with social, politicaland conventional expectations. For example, Darwin, who opposed slavery,was alert to the way the presentation of nature could be used to naturalizecoercive human structures (ibid.: 50).

Discourse was a particular problem for Darwin because, in describingevolution, he was attempting to tell a different story about nature. In effect,he had to try to invoke a complete shift in perspectives on nature and manby using language saturated with expectations drawn from the Bible. Sohe had to use the language and structures inherited from traditional




theological accounts of how the natural world came to be. Darwin wasattempting to orient the story of nature to his key idea of `natural selection'as the way in which species mutate and transform. Such a concept wasdirectly opposed to the preceding discourse of `natural theology'.

What was ultimately so successful about On the Origin of Species wasthat it outlined a system of understanding nature without any externalauthority `generating' or `designing' or `ordaining' the way things are.Darwin wrote God out of the picture of nature. `Evolution' as Darwinpresented it was a totally self-suf®cient system. This does not mean that itcould be written about totally. Darwin's problems with language are partlythose of science in general, encountering the biases built into the way wordswork, and partly those generated by the monumental ambition of his task(ibid.: 47±9).

In the ®rst place, language is anthropocentric. Language itself evolved towork as part of the human cultural world. By contrast, Darwin not onlyeliminates God, he removes humans from the centre of evolution. Second,language assumes agency. We habitually make meanings around actionsdone by someone or something. Darwin was trying to get away from thenotion that someone, or something, initiated evolutionary transformation.The generic problem of language and agency proves to be part of Darwin'sspeci®c dif®culty in writing against the grain of his inherited discourse ofnatural theology. Here he resorts to an ingenious solution: to evict atraditional paradigm of the Christian God, he invokes an even older mythof sacred Nature, the earth mother (see Chapter 2).

An additional issue with language, as Beer explains, is that Darwin isaddressing the general public, not just the scienti®c community. Hence hecannot stray too far from the kind of conventional language and tropesfamiliar to his audience. All these dif®culties with language add up tosomething very important to any writing about nature. Evolution theorizesthat humans are not the centre of meaning, and yet our language pre-supposes that humans are just that. In this sense, language does notcorrespond to material reality. Darwin had a major story to tell. What hedid not have was a medium adapted to tell it.

On the one hand, most of the theory of evolution was not provable withinthe paradigms of science he inherited. Evolution is a story about the world,rather than the outcome of a scienti®c experiment. Science in the nineteenthcentury still drew upon principles laid down by Francis Bacon's NovumOrganum (1620). These guidelines for science not only assumed the existenceof empirical phenomena that could be subjected to repeated experiments,they also called for inductive reasoning in order to establish `laws' or truereality. Inductive reasoning requires being con®dent about multipleinstances of a natural event before being able to ascertain a causal sequence.Effectively, scienti®c method is based upon the separation of observing mindfrom nature. It had a built-in supposition of material causation and was




designed to investigate the nature of the present. How could scienti®cmethod be used to investigate the world of millions of years ago?

Using traditional scienti®c methods, Darwin could not prove that naturalselection had occurred in the distant past. He could not experiment ondinosaurs. Nor could he be con®dent that he could cite multiple instancesof an ancient event suf®ciently to use inductive reasoning to propose ade®nitive material cause. As Beer shows, Darwin is writing natural history.Here is a major work of science in which a human lifetime is an irrelevantspan of time (see Chapter 6). What Darwin can do is examine the diversityand profusion of species existing now and posit an anterior narrative. Howcan all this profusion have occurred?

What is so groundbreaking in Beer's analysis is how she shows thatDarwin needs the resources of ®ction and myth in order to tell his story.Darwin's new science of evolution is only scriptable as a narrative under-pinned by imaginative arts and ancient myth. Even so, Darwin's story ofevolution also depends upon absence; what cannot be manifest even inpoetic writing except as resonance, intuition, and an uncanny quality.

Darwin's writing contains a gap. This void is not a ¯aw in his method; itis rather a vital ingredient of his evolutionary science. Darwin, not unlikeJung, accepts that there is something unknowable about the workings ofnature. As Beer says:

Darwin displays, categorises and argues, but does not expect to containthe workings of the world in his mind, or ever fully to understand them.He believed that he had discovered the mechanism of evolution but hedid not expect to encompass the whole process. Indeed his theory wasnecessarily hypothetical rather than traditionally inductive. . .

(Beer 1983: 46)

Darwin never doubts the world is real. But he does doubt ourcategories for understanding it and indeed questions, while he shares,the categorising zeal of human beings.

(ibid.: xxx)

The mechanism of evolution was `natural selection', not super-natural.Nature selected, not God. It was a term formulated to pivot the argumentaway from the preceding view of nature as designed through `naturaltheology'. The other motif of Origin was the topos of diversi®cation. Hisnature is creative because evolution proceeds by mutation, not strictadherence to a previous form. Where contemporaries were shocked by itsemphasis on natural selection, Beer shows how Darwin's text now looksmore like ecology. He ®nds in nature an `inextricable web of af®nities'(Darwin 1859: 415, quoted in Beer 1983: 18).




Moreover, his stress on the creativity of profusion in nature does not stopwith his argument as a logical sequence. Like most great works of non-®ction literature, the matter proceeds both by rational modelling and byrhetorical arts of persuasion. Sense metaphor and analogy are crucial to hiswriting strategy of ®guring the multiplicity that he is writing about; theyembody plural possibilities in his text. The creativity of profusion is in thewriting of Origin also. The book enacts by metaphor the very plurality itseeks to convey to the reader.

Like Jung and his slain creature, Darwin grasps the possibility of othermeanings inherent in metaphor. As Beer puts it, the resulting thesis onevolution is `essentially multivalent. . . renounc[ing]. . . univocality' (Beer1983: 6). Origin is many-voiced. It therefore seeks in writing to replace theoneness native to previous accounts of nature in positing an external God.What the book provides instead is an artistic model of the creative pluralityof natural selection. In writing, it shifts a transcendent mode of creation toan embedded immanent one.

For example, one of the famous metaphors in Origin is of the tree of life,or tree of descent, as species mutate and ¯ower into new forms. Darwincame upon this metaphor when drawing a diagram and noticing its tree-likebranches (ibid.: 33). Metaphor is not really a metaphor when it comes toseem like `the way things are'. Here is a clear example where metaphor doesnot so much illustrate an argument as embody it.

Metaphor enables ideas to be expressed that cannot be logically deducedor experimentally validated. Yet metaphor is frequently considered inrelation to the arts rather than the sciences because it has propertiesusually located outside science. As Beer elucidates, metaphors like the `web'of af®nities and `tree of descent' do not stabilize meaning (ibid.: 84±6).Rather the multiplicitous quality of Origin requires more literary forms ofrepresentation.

A further, somewhat surprising, resource in the writing of Origin is itsreliance upon myth. In order to do away with a father God organizingnature from outside, Darwin has recourse to the ancestral mother. Animate`Nature' is a creature derived from very ancient myth (see Chapter 2), inwhich the Earth itself is sacred and generative. Beer shows Darwin's earthmother myth inhering in the `maternal principle' of natural selection (ibid.:64). Darwin makes natural selection maternal because he wants it to appearbenign and nurturing.

While Origin is far from a reversion to pre-scienti®c ideas about nature,it nevertheless debates many of the tropes of its biblical antecedent. Itsmethod is to revise biblical accounts via their forms of writing ratherthan entirely ignoring them. Beer demonstrates how Darwin does not getrid of myth for some other kind of writing called `science'. In fact, hereplaces the biblical myth of nature with his own new creation myth(ibid.: 107).




Evolutionary theory implied a new [creation] myth of the past: insteadof the garden at the beginning, there was the sea and the swamp.Instead of man, emptiness ± or the empire of molluscs.

(ibid.: 118)

Èmptiness' or `molluscs' as the heart of evolutionary nature does not puta high premium on consciousness. Beer argues that the essential uncon-sciousness that Darwin sees in the ongoing processes of natural selectionhas nothing to do with Freud's `spatial' unconscious (ibid.: 82). This is truebut does not extend to Jung's more complex understanding of the uncon-scious, which is far closer to Darwin.

For Jung, the unconscious of human beings has a psychoid dimensionwhere it meets the material body, or the material world (Jung 1947/1954/1960, CW8: paras. 368, 417). There is an organic connection between thehuman psyche and nature's unconscious processes. In a later section of thischapter I will explore how Jung tried to write about the èmptiness' and theèmpire of molluscs'.

Beer establishes Darwin as a Romantic materialist. She means that on theone hand he has faith in nature as a creative, nurturing force as well asfearing the èmptiness'. On the other hand he also sees no need forexplanations outside the material natural order (Beer 1983: 93). What he isalso, she explains, is a creative writer, if not, ultimately, a writer of ®ction(ibid.: 95). Along with metaphor, analogy and myth, narrative is funda-mental to Origin.

Darwin wants to tell a story of the creation of the world. What is soparadoxical is his determination to stay within material or `natural'explanations while having to admit that there was so much that could notbe known, or, if intuited, could not be fully written. Hence the elements ofprophecy in the text, because it `deliberately extends itself towards theboundaries of the literally unthinkable, which displaces the absoluteness ofman's power of reason as an instrument for measuring the world' (ibid.:92). If reason is no longer central to understanding the world, then a textneeds to draw upon the non-rational, artistic qualities in writing.

Finally, Beer takes Darwin's famous maxim, `the survival of the ®ttest',and points out its less than rational characteristics (ibid.: 109). The survivalof the ®ttest means simply that those most ®t to survive will survive. Shecites Coleridge in calling it a type of narrative that is à serpent with its tailin its mouth' (ibid.). Jung was extremely fond of this image for circularprocesses of nature, reminding readers that alchemists called it the uroboros.For him the tail-eating serpent expressed the circular process of integrationbetween the conscious and unconscious.

Perhaps it is time to consider a further analogy, that between Darwin'swriting and Jung's writing. Both thinkers struggle with the task of writingabout nature. For Darwin, writing about non-human nature reveals the




inadequacies of language as a window onto the world. Language is nowindow onto realities beyond itself. In language, nature cannot be viewedas through a passive lens. Rather nature has to be related to in a web oflanguage that uses the imagination to mythically invoke a never-to-be-fully-comprehended whole. Jung, on the other hand, is primarily concerned withpsychic nature. However, it is a psychic nature that extends into the non-human. How can his similar problems with representation suggest a wayforward for ecocriticism?

Jung, Darwin and the problem of writing the other

So far, all this chapter has given of Jung's own ideas are two key notions.Everything stems from a creative, in part unknowable, unconscious;second, the unconscious human psyche has a psychoid penetration ofmatter. In this section I am going to continue to avoid what is neat andcoherent in Jung's theory in favour of examining his struggle to write aboutpsychic nature. By comparing what Jung does for psychic nature with whatDarwin did for evolutionary nature, I hope to begin to show some of theecocritical bene®ts of a Jungian framework. The next section of this chapterwill introduce Jung's concepts.

In an essay titled `On the nature of the Psyche', Jung attempted to showthe `scienti®c' derivation of his theory (Jung 1947/1954/1960, CW8: para.356). His problem is that what he wants to write about is the unconscious.By de®nition, the unconscious cannot be written about, it is not witnessedor weighed or measurable. Like Darwin, Jung speaks of unknown laws thathe is unable to deduce from the previously established laws of nature (ibid.:para. 375).

Unsurprisingly, Jung resorts to metaphor and analogy. A fundamentalmetaphor is that of light to suggest both knowledge and consciousness.From dim apprehensions in the early part of the essay, light becomes ameans of differentiating the energy of one of Jung's major ideas, that ofarchetypes. An archetype is an inherited structuring principle of image andmeaning. Jung uses an analogy of the light spectrum in suggesting that theinfrared instinctual pole of the archetype is where it folds into the body andits psychoid energy (ibid.: para. 414). The ultraviolet pole of the lightspectrum signi®es where the archetype seems to have escaped bodilyincarnation altogether and become spirit.

We see here that, like Darwin, metaphor becomes substantiated: light isnot representing consciousness metaphorically; it is consciousness.

Since consciousness has always been described in terms derived fromthe behaviour of light, it is. . . not too much to assume that thesemultiple luminosities correspond to tiny conscious phenomena.

(Jung 1947/1954/1960, CW8: para. 396)




Indeed, Jung is explicit on the role of poetic language as superior in itsexpressive qualities, and therefore more psychologically useful than rationalor logical terms (ibid.: para. 409). Rational language is all very well, but ifyour core psychic principle is the creativity of the unknown parts of themind then poetry, drama and myth are better ways to represent it. To Jung,creative language is closer to psychic nature than rational concepts. Heconceded that `science' required rational concepts, yet he repeatedly warnedagainst egocentrically believing that reason was the only important part ofhuman nature (Jung 1922/1966, CW15: para. 121).

After all, the slain creature quotation embodies Jung's sense that per-fectly de®ned ideas about the psyche not only miss its living qualities butalso drain its vitality. A few lines later he is even more trenchant. Using aconcept can, in itself, distort psychic reality (Jung 1947/1954/1960, CW8:para. 356). This is because concepts are constructed using rational lan-guage. They belong to the ego. Therefore, concepts have limited applic-ability to the most important aspect of the psyche, which is to Jung thecreative, and in part unknowable, unconscious.

Nevertheless, Jung admits that we cannot do without rationality. Whathe seeks to do is to return conceptual abstractions to their roots in a moreprotean psychic nature. What is native to the psyche is creative fantasy andimages produced in dreams. Hence psychic image and psychic meaning areidentical because the ¯owering of the unconscious in human creativity ismore innate, more `true', than any ego-controlled rational construction(ibid.: para. 402). When it comes to psychic nature, Jung wants it to speakfor itself and regards `interpretation' as unnecessary (ibid.).

So, in addition to dream images, Jung here values such arcane visualsymbolism as the tail-eating serpent, the uroboros, as evidence of uncon-scious qualities (ibid.: para. 416). The uroboros expresses a secret of nature;it does not describe it. Jung suggests that the symbol indicates the circu-lation of energy within psychic nature. As there is a cycle of energy in thenatural world, so Jung sees a similar fertilizing cycle of energy exchangebetween conscious and unconscious. Moreover, the two cycles are inter-linked. Human unconscious entities, which he called archetypes, are part ofnature (ibid.: para. 412). Like Darwin, Jung uses the term `nature' uni-versally. As Darwin placed humans ®rmly within nature in natural selec-tion, so Jung designates the unconscious as the `natural' part of the humanbeing, and also connected to nature in the psychoid (ibid.: para. 417).

Finally, on the question of the dif®culty of writing about psychic nature,Jung has recourse to analogy in order to posit a theory. If concepts andrational thinking are less authentic of psychic nature than creative fantasy,then theory cannot be assumed to be unproblematically valid (ibid.: para.421±4). In fact, Jung has exactly the same problem as Darwin. For Darwin,language is human-centred, but his theory of evolution is not. It centres on`emptiness' and `molluscs', as Beer put it. Similarly for Jung, theory is




rational and ego-centred; yet the truth of the psyche is unconscious-centred.Suggestive for future ecocritical arguments, Jung placed the natural part ofhumans as the centre of his psychology. Yet, as the true source of thepsyche, the unconscious cannot be coherently theorized.

So Jung uses analogies of the net, the model and the pivot to put forwardhis theory. He says that his psychology is merely a model because it issimply a framework or a perspective on the psyche (ibid.: para. 381). Hedescribes himself as immersed in his research, discovering it to be a `net ofre¯ections' that lead beyond science and into the humanities (ibid.: para.421). Meditating upon the paradox of using the psyche to investigate thepsyche, he describes it as a pivot that shifts the entire order of the world(ibid.: para. 423).

For Jung, the world is a cosmos of natural energy. Only the humanpsyche is capable of generating consciousness to such an extent that thenatural order is put at risk. As he points out, all of human learning isa speci®cally honed form of consciousness. For example, nuclear physics, aproduct of the psyche like everything else cultural, can `kill' many people allat once (ibid.: para. 421).

It is time to be more speci®c about Jung's `model' of psychology.

A model does not assert anything. . . Jung's basic plot

Jung's attitude to his theory as a model is important in distinguishing hisideas from his illustrious contemporary, Sigmund Freud. Jung worked withFreud as a junior partner from 1907 to 1912, until they disagreed on certainkey approaches towards the psyche. Freud insisted that the psyche wasde®ned by sexual energy called the libido. Jung believed that psychic energywas essentially neutral. The libido could manifest as sexuality, or it couldexhibit spirituality as a genuine expression of psychic being. Religious feel-ing and spirituality were authentic types of unconsciousness, although theydid not necessarily entail a sacred reality beyond the psyche.

What follows is that both devout belief and atheism are compatible withJungian ideas. Jung suggested that the psyche was innately structured byinherited creative principles he called archetypes. These are not inheritedimages, nor inborn meanings. Rather an archetype helps to produce adream image or creative expression, known as an archetypal image. Thesearchetypal images are also shaped by a person's historical and individuallife. My dream image of a mother is an archetypal image because it re¯ectsmy actual mother and also has a special resonance from the symbolic powerof mothering channelled by the archetype.

No one knows how many archetypes exist. Of particular importance arearchetypes of gender. Somewhat conservative in this area (see Chapter 3),Jung saw the conscious part of being, the ego, as unproblematically gen-dered according to bodily shape. A woman has a female ego and vice versa.




Yet, this simpli®cation is swept aside by the implications of Jung's mostimportant principle, the creativity and unknowability of the unconscious.Jung thought that the unconscious actively tried to engage the ego in alifelong relationship that he called individuation. Its main way of doing thiswas through compensation of ego biases. Therefore it enlisted the passionsof the ego by compensating its gender.

The ànima' is the term Jung gave to a man's unconscious femininity; theànimus' to the unconscious masculinity of a woman. One falls in love withmembers of the opposite sex when they incarnate aspects of one's own inneròther'. Although Jung assumed heterosexuality, what is germane to indi-viduation is complementarity; so that there is no intrinsic reason why awoman might not possess an anima and/or ®nd òtherness' in other womenor vice versa.

Complementarity, or compensation, also has a darker side. Evocatively,Jung gifts humanity with a `shadow'. This unconscious archetypal ®gure isformed through what we repress, what we do not want to be. Such dis-carded material meets the innate creativity of the archetypal unconsciousand produces a dark energy. Animas, animuses and shadows stalk ourdreams. A dream for Jung is a concrete picture of a psychic situation. It isnot a disguise; it offers no hidden message. Rather, as communication fromthe superior unconscious, it is to be trusted for itself.

Individuation is a process of subjectivity. It is the way we make con-sciousness by learning to attend to the source of being in the unconscious. Italso has a goal. Jung saw the psyche as teleological, goal oriented. The egois moving towards ever greater relationship with a superior archetype hecalled the self.

To Jung, authentic being is not to be found in the ego, and so the uncon-scious `self' is our possibility for psychic wholeness. It rests in the unknowableunconscious. So he conceptualized this impossible-to-rationalize statecosmologically. The ego through individuation becomes a satellite of theself as inner sun. In this way the self as archetype expresses true identity in/with nature in the unconscious. Since archetypes are unconscious, they cannever be represented. Even the self is a hypothetical identity.

Two ®nal points about the self begin with a paradox. Jung called the selfboth an archetype amongst others and also standing for the totality ofbeing, that is, ego and the whole psyche together. The paradox is deliberate,in the sense that Jung is trying to prevent rationalism from smothering thepsychic life of his psychology. To put it another way, the paradox is only aparadox to logic and conceptual thinking. In fact, these two versions of theself are narrative and can be considered as appropriate images for differentparts of life.

Finally, the dual portrayal of self as one of many archetypes versus atranscendent wholeness of being has a deeper resonance. It embodies thetension between Jung's Christian heritage of a single God and the older




mythical structure of animism; e.g. many incarnate spirits. As I shall show,such a dichotomy also has relevance for ecocriticism. For now, Jung's ®gureof a `model' as a particular kind of perspective on the psyche is practical.Further Jungian ideas will be explored as needed. It is time to consider someways in which Darwin as a writer of myth found a scienti®c successor.

Post-Darwinian evolution and language for TheEcocritical Psyche

James Lovelock proposed his Gaia hypothesis in 1979, in Gaia: A NewLook at Life on Earth. Using an ancient name for the earth goddess to`label' a scienti®c theory was his deliberate attempt to get away from themechanistic view of nature. Arguably, of course, Darwin himself hadrejected Enlightenment mechanics, in portraying evolution through themyth of nurturing mother earth.

Lovelock wanted to abandon relatively lifeless language about the earthbecause he regarded it as misleading. His Gaia hypothesis suggested thatthe whole planet asserts two key revisions to Darwin's overall thesis. First,rather than being an arena of competing single species, the earth is intri-cately interwoven, so that species and environments interact in incrediblycomplex ways. Second, and more contentiously, the planet's systems areessentially self-adjusting so as to promote the continuing evolution of life.Yes, Gaia is about evolution. Nevertheless, this `evolution' entails far morethan adaptation to environment. Rather, Gaia posits an extreme mutuality.The ecosystem is not a supplier of inert `environment'; it is co-evolving.

A further twist to the traditional Darwinian view comes with Gaia'sradical problematization of what constitutes a single animal. A cow is nolonger a cow. In fact, a cow is a collection of different organisms: from thebacteria inside, to ticks on its hide, to creatures that make good homes in itsdung, to the processing of its methane and carbon dioxide, etc. So inter-woven is Gaia's ecosystem, that the earth seems to behave as if it possessesconsciousness and agency. Again we reach a point in which an environ-mental metaphor threatens to claim actuality. Is `Gaia' a metaphor for aplanetary ecosystem with an incredibly complex interwoven, self-regulating,delicate structures promoting life? Or is Gaia a way of expressing ourplanet, our `nature' as alive, powerful and sentient?

One way to take this discussion of nature, metaphor and science furtheris to look at how recent research also disputes the mechanistic account ofthe universe.

The field: New science and language of the cosmic web

In The Cosmic Web: Scienti®c Field Models & Literary Strategies in the 20thCentury (1984), N. Katherine Hayles shows that what she calls `the ®eld' of




reality is a metaphor derived from the implications of Einstein's theory ofrelativity, quantum mechanics, and their consequences for language.

`The ®eld', like Gaia, stresses that everything is interconnected. What issigni®cant here is that èverything' includes the observing consciousness. Itssecond most potent characteristic is that language is self-referential.Although we are used to words apparently denoting autonomous eventsòut there', in fact this re¯ects not `reality' but the deep structure of Indo-European languages. These languages embody the assumptions ofNewtonian physics and so push language towards a mechanistic orderingof reality (ibid.: 16). Inherent within the Newtonian perspective are twopropositions: that there is a separation between observer and observed, andthat time ¯ows in one direction.

By contrast, relativity and quantum theory show that any separationbetween subject and object is an arbitrary distinction (ibid.: 31). What wesee of reality depends upon where we are. Moreover, cause and effect aremultidimensional. The world is a quivering, dynamic living whole. As such,it cannot be understood by human reason alone. We are always within thecosmic web of language and nature or reality; there is no way to look at itfrom the outside.

Hayles points out that scientists learned the hard way that they could nottreat language as a transparent window on scienti®c truth. An attempt inthe early twentieth century to produce stripped-down linguistic tools failedbecause it was impossible to separate out `theory' from òbservation' (ibid.:38±9). All science has habitual languages and practices, or discourse. Theseencode assumptions that vitally in-form or `frame' what the science pro-duces. To put it another way, science uses metaphors and tends to sub-stantiate them, as Darwin and Jung discovered.

When language is part of the mediating ®eld (i.e., the means by whichthe relation between subject and object is described), it participates inthe interconnection at the same time that it purports to describe it.

(Hayles 1984: 41)

Moreover, the unconscious is part of this cosmic web. Hayles speaks ofthe frustration of this new science of ®eld theory with the traditionallanguage of modernity that appears unable to articulate it. This scienti®cvision of `the ®eld' is vital for ecocriticism, which is looking for images andperspectives on language outside the positivism of the Newtonian heritage.One place to ®nd such resources may be shamanistic practices that regardlanguage as an embodied gift; one not con®ned to human beings.

The alphabet of nature: Two kinds of magic

Animism is a worldview in which nature is full of speaking voices, somecapable of entering into dialogue with humans. Shamans are often part of




animistic cultures where religion, arts and medicines are not separate dis-ciplines. They become a holistic meditation with nature. Characteristics ofshamanism include the absence of a canon of religious doctrine and anembodied inter-relationship with spirits in nature. Shamans learn and teachthe respectful communication that this articulate relationship with natureentails.

In indigenous oral cultures, nature itself is articulate; it speaks. Thehuman voice in an oral culture is always to some extent participantwith the voices of wolves, wind, and waves ± participant, that is, withthe encompassing discourse of an animate earth.

(Abrams 1996: 116±17)

David Abrams, in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996), and in BecomingAnimal (2010), shows how indigenous oral communities have a sophis-ticated use of language that we might try to understand via the work ofHayles on the ®eld. For shamanic animistic societies language is not awindow onto a mechanical universe; rather, humans participate in conver-sations with other creatures. Language is therefore not an exclusivelyhuman property. Through body and unconscious, as in shamanic tranceand ritual, the poetry of creatures can be intuited, realised.

To recent science Abrams adds a philosophical perspective that comesclose to restoring animism to Western modernity. `Phenomenology', begunby Edmund Husserl and continued by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, takesseriously the embodied nature of our sensory platform in the world. Theresult is something very much like animism.

Only by af®rming the animateness of perceived things do we allow ourworlds to emerge directly from the depths of our on-going reciprocity withthe world.

(Abrams 1996: 56, italics in original)

But what about those modern discourses of nature that treat animals asmachines? Surprisingly, Abrams says that both oral cultures and thosedependent upon the written word experience language as `magic'. Never-theless, it proves to be a very different kind of magic in dissimilar socialstructures. Essentially, Abrams begins from the position that language is akind of magic in its transforming effects on human consciousness. It ismagic for oral societies because it is born of an embodied participatoryrelationship with animate nature. Oral cultures retain a sense of the body intheir language because bodily gesturing is always present: words are ¯eshlyand responsive to wind, rain, bird or worm. The magic of writing impartsdifferent qualities.

Writing cultures, conversely, do retain a sense of the incarnate world solong as the actual script is pictographic, meaning that it remains implicitlyconnected to embodied reality (ibid.: 130±40). However, most Western




languages use a phonetic alphabet, in which writing has no direct connec-tion to body or nature. Surprisingly, even here, animism, as many voicesoriginating in nature, does not die.

Animism is transferred, by the magic of this new technology, into thewritten script. Our modern practices of reading and writing are intrinsicallyanimistic. We say, `the book' speaks, `the text says'. Now we track meaningacross printed pages where once we tracked wild animals.

These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you nowfocus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly differentfrom the footprints of prey left in the snow. We read these traces withorgans honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors. . . hunting themeaning, which would be the meeting with the Other.

(Abrams 1996: 96)

Although we experience estrangement from nature in today's culture, in thedeep forms of our writing we are not so very different to indigenous oralpeoples.

So two kinds of magic enchant our senses in the web of language. Here isanother understanding that language is not neutral or transparent, evenwhen we think it is. A magic that connected us to nature in animism and itsshamans is now beginning to be validated by scienti®c ideas such as Gaiaecology and biological studies newly fascinated by the signifying systems ofplants (see Chapter 2). The other magic of so-called rational language wasdeveloped through testing the powers of the phonetic alphabet. Arguably, ithas dangerously over-stretched itself.

This is the magic that hunted down the `slain creature' with which thischapter began. Jung says later in that paragraph that grasping unconsciousnature is a `magical procedure' (Jung 1947/1954/1960, CW8: para. 356). Hegoes on to assert the participatory nature of language.

[H]e never suspects that the very fact of grasping the object concep-tually gives it a golden opportunity to display all those qualities whichwould never have made their appearance had it not been imprisoned ina concept.

(ibid.)

Language intervenes in psychic nature; it does not simply portray it. Jung isstarting to appear well positioned to make an ecocritical contribution. It istime to look for his ecological potential.

Jung for ecocriticism

So far this chapter has argued for a productive convergence in the writingof evolution, ecocritical literary theory, the new sciences of `the ®eld',phenomenology and learning from indigenous oral cultures. To this heady




mix, I want to add Jung for his work on the creative nature within humanbeings. My argument is that Jung's work on the human unconscious asnature is poised to expand our understanding of literature and ecology.

What unites the areas above are principally three insights that challengethe way the modern technological world has denigrated nature. First, thatthe earth is Gaia, or a cosmic web, or simply so inter-penetrated that itmakes no sense to see humans in isolation from nature. There is no objec-tive nature `out there'; we are always within her embrace.

Second, our language does not describe nature; it intervenes in it. Ourmetaphors penetrate the very stuff of life. Third, science is beginning totake co-evolution seriously, positing the living world as mutually com-municating, with an unconscious processing. Such intimations approach thewisdom of shamanistic societies for whom nature is articulate.

As for Jung, it might be useful to specify how he offers a differentstarting point on language than Freudian psychoanalytic literary theory.For it is one of Jung's fundamental contributions to ecocriticism that heenvisions language as rooted in the body, and such embodied signifying isultimately connected to non-human nature.

After Freud, the theorist Jacques Lacan took a radical step by makingthe young child's acquisition of language the de®ning event in constructingthe conscious ego. When the child begins to sense that it is no longer part ofthe mother's body or being, it experiences a sense of lack. The infant psychesplits. The desire for oneness with the maternal is repressed to make theunconscious, and the resulting solitary ego is haunted by this loss. Acquir-ing language in that bodily `lack' is the process of psychic splitting. Signsmean an `absence' of the object of desire.

Hence the organisation of language, which also contains the codes ofsociety (Lacan called this the Symbolic Order), is resonant with the absenceof bodily connection. As the originary wholeness with the actual mother isrepressed, so `she' takes on the signifying of nature itself. This occursbecause of Lacan's revision of the Oedipus complex. Rather than the penisbeing the ¯eshly organ of gender differentiation, Lacan has the phallus, thesign of masculinity. By entry into the Symbolic order, the child takes up adifferent relation to the phallus. Neither gender has it, for as the privilegedsigni®er it stands for the ultimate ful®lment forever denied in the loss of thematernal bond. Yet the social coding of gender is ambiguous. Lacan givesmales an indirect relation to the phallus, while females are expected tosignify it for the males.

What this all adds up to ecocritically is a theory of language and psychethat either describes or prescribes patriarchy, depending how it is read. Isthe privileging of the phallus inevitable because of how humanity is Oedipalat its base? Or are societies organized around a mysti®cation of power,with the masculine and patriarchal effectively sponsoring the elevation ofthe phallus?




Even more importantly, Lacan's ego formation by entry into the SymbolicOrder reinforces the notion of nature as subject to binary structuring.Lacan's revised Oedipus complex severs human language from an organicconnection with nature. Moreover, it suggests that to be human is to sup-press what is most natural in us. It is also a re-writing of the earth mothermyth that puts her ®rmly in her place, underground, leaving rationality andhuman culture to the phallic Father (see Chapter 2).

By contrast, Jung offers other possibilities. Recalling his most importantproposition, that the unconscious is intrinsically creative and partly unknow-able, indicates a different emphasis to both ego formation and the relation-ship with language. Jung accepted Freud's Oedipus complex as the basicprocess leading to a conscious ego. However, he added his theory of theunconscious psyche. Of course the embryonic ego has to repress the over-whelming connection to the mother, making the differentiation betweenconscious and unconscious. Yet, that very unconscious is the true mother, or(m)other.

The psyche is not just chaotic energies waiting for Oedipal tragedies tothreaten. Jung's infant psyche is part of evolved nature. It contains inbornpotential structuring called archetypes. The psyche is creative; it wants togive birth to the ego. Making the conscious mind is a co-operative creativeprocess between Oedipal strategies ®ltered through a particular culture andunconscious active nature. To Jung, the making of human subjectivity isdone partly by the highly skilled unconscious, which is our inheritance fromthe womb. Most importantly, this unconscious is of the body in two keyways. First, the unconscious is a bodily inheritance partly because themother is not only repressed, but also embraced in Jung's understanding.The embodied psyche that is Jung's pre-Oedipal mother is a creative organhelping to make the ego.

Second, our unconscious is also somatic because to Jung, the structuringelements in the psyche ± archetypes ± are rooted in the body, yet notgoverned by it. Psychic autonomy in positing meaning is very important toJung. He regarded the psyche as embodied, and the psychoid quality toarchetypes was the point in which human nature became part of the natureoutside us.

Consequently, it is worth spelling out what this variation in ego forma-tion means for language. Arguably Jung presents a Symbolic Order oflanguage and social codes in which the natural order and patriarchy are atvariance. First of all, language and psychic imagery are connected to thebody in the positive role assigned to the embodied unconscious. Second,since this unconscious is envisioned as part of evolved nature, with arche-types functioning as part of the natural order, language has a fundamentalroot in non-human nature. Third, Jung's scheme does not privilege thephallus.




To understand how Jungian ideas de-throne the phallus requires goingback to Jung's core belief in the psyche as self-regulating. Certainly, asociety may be biased towards masculinity or femininity and provide anunquestionable or transcendental signi®er of the privileged gender. How-ever, the Jungian psyche, although connected to the body, can also actindependently in meaning-making.

The signi®cant point here is that the psyche is androgynous and thereforeas capable of making potent feminine images as masculine ones. In actualsocieties the demands of powerful discourses on the ego may skew signi-fying. Such distortions into unfair and unequal cultures will in turn provokea compensating reaction from the creative unconscious. Indeed, given thatindividuation works by compensating for ego bias, the nature of theJungian unconscious is to strengthen what is despised or marginalized ingender, nature or òther'.

The Jungian psyche promotes the other in any particular social setting. Itdoes so because the social other will be one embodiment of the psychicother. Jung's emphasis on the creative, in part unknowable, unconsciousentails an ethical stand respecting the other however a culture de®nes it.Given that this other is inherently structured as both ìnside' and òutside' aperson, as unconscious, gender other, ethnic other, non-human other, theJungian psyche inherently deconstructs the binary othering of nature inmodernity.

So, for ecocriticism it may be possible to sum up the Jungian potential inthree ways: Jung's re-invention of the nature/culture binary; Jung's model-ling of human communication with non-human nature; Jung's views oncreativity and nature.

Jung re-invents nature/culture

To revisit the comparison with Lacan is to notice how Jung re-negotiatestwo of Kate Soper's three uses of the word `nature'. Where the Freudian/Lacanian tradition pushes towards a binary understanding of nature versusculture, in which nature inheres in the bodily embrace of the mother whichmust be repressed, Jung offers a psyche whose health depends upon pro-ductive exchanges between ego and unconscious. Indeed, since his uncon-scious is the source of being, and is embedded in both body and nature,psychic growth is dedicated to reuniting nature and culture.

So Jung challenges Soper's ®rst instance of the modern use of the word`nature' in deconstructing the binary. In her second example, he alsoradically shifts the Newtonian notion of universal `laws of nature'. Authen-ticity of being inheres in unpicking the binary system of an over ration-alized modernity to one in which `laws of nature' include unconsciousarchetypes. Here Jung follows in the footsteps of Darwin. Where Darwin




showed humanity to have kinship with molluscs, to be a type of animal,Jung also wants to re-place humanity in the natural order. Both thinkersincorporate the unknowable into their writing. Moreover, both of them endup with an idea of language as participant in the natural order, rather thanexternal to it.

Jung models communication with nature

Jung, like Darwin, was wary about claiming authority for his theory bynaturalizing it. However, with a psyche penetrating nature and psychicnature, his work provides models for approaching nature today.

First of all, we should notice a foundational structure in the dialoguebetween monotheism and animism. The notion of archetypes is an animisticstructure because it liberates a psyche of many voices, is embedded in theunknowable, and has sources for generating meaning. Such animistic bed-rock provides an ancient architecture of the soul. Yet it is also partnered bya strong tendency to monotheism, a drive to privilege oneness and unity inmeaning. Animistic archetypes are partnered by Jung's liking to privilegeone archetype above all the others and call it the self.

The archetypes may also be projected onto non-human nature, or, as Ihave been arguing, may be continuous with non-human nature in theirpsychoid aspect. The other way to see the animistic psyche as nature's voicesis to remember the new science of ®eld theory. Here the mutual participationof observer and observed works with the wisdom of Gaia, in which allis entangled. So Jung provides a model of human psychic in-corporationin nature.

Moreover, it is possible to argue that the human unconscious is, in somesense, a consciousness for nature. Here ecocriticism's ethical commitment tothe non-human other can be met by Jung's assertion of the ethical andmeaningful priority of the unconscious other.

So, the Jungian psyche models the superimposition of monotheism onanimistic connections to nature. Can it, perhaps, model its undoing? As asecond way of envisioning nature ecocritically, after the revival of animism,Jung re-values myth as a foundation to knowledge. Myth, we recall, hasproved indispensable to Darwin, and certainly to non-Western shamanicunderstandings of nature. Chapter 2 will look at Jung's re-vitalisation ofmyth for ecocriticism. But ®rst, let us consider Jung's contribution to under-standing art as nature's creativity through us.

Jung on creativity and nature in the arts

Since Jung's unconscious psyche is distinguished by creativity and is partlyunknowable, this core principle is also his vision of nature. Hence the




imagination and its works are psychic texts in which nature and the bodyare also imbued. Of course Jung noted that not all works of culture reson-ated with the depths of the archetypal psyche. He categorized images, whichincluded words in literature, into two types: signs and symbols. To Jung, asign related to a known thing or idea. It exempli®ed what Lacan called theSymbolic Order, and which Jung called cultural consciousness: the knownorder of society.

Conversely, symbols are redolent of the deep unconscious. Indeed,because we all inherit the same thesaurus of archetypes, Jung called it thecollective unconscious. Symbols bring intimations from the deep, fromnature, and the body. Yet symbols are not innocent of culture. Since eveninspired art is ®ltered through the ego, the ego's history will affect the art.

Another key ingredient that Jung's theories of art take from his psy-chology is the notion of teleology. Individuation is goal-oriented because itis going somewhere in its pursuit of ever greater union with the self. Hesuggested that works of art deeply embodied in the creative and partlyunknowable psyche could be teleological for the culture. Here his theory ofindividuation through unconscious compensation of ego bias is enacted at acultural level. A society's blindness summons forth a compensating art fromthe depths of its roots in unconscious nature.

So ®nally, I want to portray Jung himself as an ecocritical writer whoprovides an ecocritical psyche. In turn that offers an ecocritical under-standing of imaginative arts and, on the large scale, of our relationship tonature. Jung is an ecocritical writer because his founding principle of theintrinsically creative and in part unknowable psyche means that his writingcannot be ego-centred. It follows that his writing cannot also be human-centred because he is aware that the de®nition of human is culturallycontracted and subject to centuries of repression of the other. As a writer,he is forced to draw on resources of ancient myth and symbolic systems,such as alchemy, that construe nature differently. Jung therefore is, in somesense, a pioneer of nature writing, especially if we remember that his per-spective makes no de®nitive distinction between human nature (in theunconscious) and non-human nature.

What is secondarily vital for ecocriticism is the Jungian psyche in whichthe pivotal notion of embodied archetypes is so resonant for envisioningnature as articulate. Two related ideas are seminal: ®rst, that language isembodied; second, that some language has deep roots in nature throughsymbols that penetrate/are penetrated by the unconscious.

Moreover, the embodied symbol shifts function from metaphor tometonym: language here is continuous with nature rather than preserving aseparation. Another contribution of Jung for ecocriticism will prove to behis radical treatment of myth as a way of simultaneously describing andchanging consciousness. Further developments of Jung for ecocriticism willbe part of the following chapters.




About this book

The Ecocritical Psyche is based on the ambiguities that perplex modernattitudes towards nature. It constructs Jung as an eco-writer (see above),and also as an ecocritic of modernity. Similarly, the literature considered inthe subsequent chapters is shown through Jung's work to re¯ect, embodyand resist the repression of nature's voices.

In order to present an ecocritical psyche through Jungian ideas, the bookis roughly divided between an exploration of problems native to ecocritic-ism and some radical and experimental remedies. The ®rst three chaptersconsider successively: writing, the body and the Christian legacy of Heavenand Hell. Chapters follow them on new evolutionary theories of natureas animated, hunting as a survival skill still possessed in modernity, andShakespeare's political magic.

A map of the book begins in Chapter 1 by looking at how writing aboutnature and writing about the unconscious are not only similarly problem-atic, but may even signi®cantly overlap. Indeed, even examining the issueshere illuminates ecocritical concerns about how far culture is estrangedfrom nature. Chapter 2 will take up the consequences for the body inliterature within the framework proposed in Chapter 1. Jane Austen andSeamus Heaney are unlikely companion writers. Yet in Heaney's bogpoems and Austen's novels are similar anxieties about the human body in anatural setting and framed by the topos of work. In addition, whatparticularly enhances Jungian ecocriticism is how alchemy and myth offersymbolic systems of embodiment in nature.

In Chapter 3, `The problem of Heaven and Hell for Emily Bronte',Jungian ecocriticism considers the Gothic as a literary and ecological resist-ance to society and gender severed from nature (Bronte 1847/1990). Here, inhis own writing, Jung provides some additional resources in the form ofGothic structures of extreme passion. This chapter will also use GastonBachelard's re-framing of the imaginative image, and Ginette Paris's TheWisdom of the Psyche, in order to situate Jung as both a critical lens for theGothic and one of its authors (Bachelard 1943/1988; Paris 2007).

The focus for Chapter 4 is `Re-®guring evolution for children's litera-ture'. It explores new work on evolution known as complexity theory and/or emergence. Such `science' suggests an animate form of consciousness innature. Using The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe plus The SecretGarden, I will explore co-evolution as an approach to the maturing psyche(Lewis 1950; Hodgson Burnett 1911).

In Chapter 5, I again combine evolutionary science and ecocriticism,avoiding the problem of how determinist scienti®c ideas can be if simplyslapped on top of the literary text. Jungian ecocriticism can be used todeconstruct the hierarchy of science over text by privileging the inherentcreativity of the unconscious. So, in `Hunting signs with the trickster




detectives', the genre of detective ®ction is considered in relation to theancient trickster myth, which in turn may have arisen as consciousnessevolved in relation to hunting.

Chapter 6 looks at Shakespeare's theatre as an embodied social practiceoffering to the audience a profound alteration of consciousness. Drawingon the important post-Jungian theory of political forms by AndrewSamuels, and some new analysis of natural taxonomy, the chapter willdemonstrate the sophisticated deconstruction of political power withinRichard II and The Tempest (Shakespeare 1597, 1611). The heady alchemyof politics and drama provides a magic that recalls more ancient andshamanistic unions with nature.

The Ecocritical Psyche includes a seventh chapter in which I look at someof the ambiguities of writing inside and outside of nature by considering theinspiration, the inspiriting, of this book. So this chapter, titled `The writerand the underworld', explores the myth of research and writing itself. Itbreaks with the usual scholarly boundaries, yet does so, I hope, in a waythat remains faithful to the book as a whole.

The Ecocritical Psyche therefore respects the monotheistic value ofoffering the reader coherence and a sequence of chapters that add up. Yet Ialso try to respect literary voices in evolving mediums, such as in mycollaboration with the digital literary artist Joel Weishaus, in Chapter 7.This includes the sense that we need to re-invent traditional forms, ®ndways in which our nature may spill out from book into world, and toinhabit the book of the world.




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