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Blue Horses
and
Illuminating the Shadow
(a novel manuscript and exegesis)
By Christine Bongers
B.Bus. (Comm) QIT, MBA Southern Cross University
Creative Writing and Cultural Studies Discipline
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
Submitted in fulfillment of Master of Arts (Research)
2008
Key Terms
Carl Gustav Jung, Shadow Archetype, Individuation, Collective Unconscious, Julia
Kristeva, Abject, Young Adult Literature, Creative writing, Thesis, Masters.
ii
Abstract
The novel manuscript Blue Horses focuses on a dusty corner of 1970’s Queensland
in this evocative tale of family, shadows that hang over from childhood and beauty
found in unexpected places. Its protagonist, Cecilia Maria, was named after saints
and martyrs to give her something to live up to. “Over my dead body,” she vows.
Her battles with a six-pack of brothers and the despised Kapernicke girls from the
farm next door teach her an unforgettable lesson that echoes down through the
years. Now she’s heading back to where it all began, with teenagers Jed and Jenna
reluctantly in tow. She plans to dance on a grave and track down some ghosts.
Instead she learns a new lesson at the gravesite of an old enemy.
The exegesis examines Jung’s concept of the Shadow Archetype as a catalyst
for individuation in writing for young adults. It discusses the need to re-vision
Jung’s work within a feminist framework and contrasts it to Julia Kristeva’s work
on the abject. Alyssa Brugman’s Walking Naked and Sonya Hartnett’s Sleeping
Dogs are analysed in relation to these concepts and lead into my own creative
reflections on, and justification for, use of the Shadow conceptual framework. In
following my shadow and establishing a creative dialogue between my conscious
intent and unconscious inspirations, I have discovered a writing self that is “other”
to the professional writer persona of my past.
iii
Table of Contents
Statement of Original Ownership v
Acknowledgements vi
Creative Work – a novel manuscript: Blue Horses 1
Exegesis - Illuminating the Shadow 252
Introduction 253
Part One: Literature Review 257
(i) Grappling with Shadows 257
(ii) Re-visioning Jung 260
(iii) Fangs & pimples & claws & all – Individuation & young adults 261
Part Two: Growing Up and Growing Wise 265
(i) Walking Naked by Alyssa Brugman 265
(ii) Sleeping Dogs by Sonya Hartnett 269
Part Three: Creative Reflection - The Heart of the Stone 272
Conclusions 281
Bibliography 284
iv
Statement of Original Authorship
The work contained in this thesis is my own and has not been previously submitted
to meet the requirements for any award at this or any other higher education
institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material
previously published or written by another person except where due reference is
made.
Signature: _________________________________
Christine Mary Bongers
Date: __________________________________
v
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my supervisor Associate Professor Sharyn Pearce for her warm
support, my associate supervisor Dr Vivienne Muller for helping me negotiate
Kristevan theory, my QUT youth writing cohort for the peer critiques and to Peter
Bishop from Varuna for long-short-listing an early draft in the 2006 Varuna
Manuscript Development Awards.
Love and thanks to my husband Andrew for supporting and believing in me
always, and to Connor, Brydie, Clancy and Jake, for making our lives complete and
accepting the importance of my writing as work. To Mum for encouraging me to read
“brown paper if that was all I could get my hands on,” to my dear departed Dad for
setting me on this fictional journey and to my six brothers, whose younger selves
helped inspire the characters of Big Hairs, Punk, Wart, Fatlump, Lick and Cool Hand.
Special thanks to Mike for proof-reading; Tony, Peter, Rick and Tim for providing all
the details I had forgotten or never known about cars, farming and machinery in the
1970s (any errors are mine, not theirs); and to Jason for reminding me what a surly
teenager I was back then.
I am indebted to the late Lyle Semgreen of Jambin, for showing a much younger
me his prized “Blue Horse” thunder egg, which provided creative inspiration and my
manuscript’s title. While I have drawn heavily on the place and time of my childhood
to create this story, it is fiction: none of our lovely neighbours at Jambin bear any
resemblance to the Kapernickes and any other character’s resemblance to any person,
living or dead, is purely (or, in the great Jungian tradition of synchronicity, perhaps
meaningfully) coincidental. vi
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
252
Illuminating the Shadow
An exegesis
by Christine Bongers
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
253
Introduction
The shadow stands on the threshold. We can let it bar the way to the creative
depths of the unconscious, or we can let it lead us to them.
Ursula Le Guin, The Child and the Shadow
As he lay dying, my father told me two things that seemed unrelated at the time.
The first was that I was the only one of his seven children to pay him back for the
car that he had helped each of us to buy. My reaction – ricocheting between outrage
and amusement - delighted the old stirrer. Then, amidst the grim tangle of tubes and
drips, bandages and blood, he gave me a final piece of advice: “You don’t want to
die without doing what you were meant to do, without being what you were meant
to be.”
His words raised questions I hadn’t considered in years and they still have
the power to make my chest ache. I had reached the chronological halfway point in
life. A busy career as a broadcast journalist, PR practitioner and lobbyist, had
segued into home-based work and children. I had been paid to write professionally
for most of my adult life, yet I rarely wrote creatively: I was afraid to expose the
limits of my talent to a more critical audience, which included myself. It seemed far
easier and safer, to hide behind the mask of my professional persona.
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
254
After my father’s death, fear of failure seemed nothing compared to the
cowardice implicit in a failure to even try. I began to write creatively, but without
any clear intent; with only a vague sense of wanting to recreate a time and a place
where my father was young and powerful and, of course, alive. It disturbed me that
I found him an elusive character to capture on the page, while a most insistent,
bolshy little voice kept writing itself into page after page. “Listen to your
characters,” counsels Venero Armanno (2007), “The ones that write themselves are
trying to tell you something.”
After a couple of false starts I discovered I wasn’t writing my Dad’s story; I
wasn’t even writing my own. The bolshy little character who became Cecilia Maria
or Sis for short, had her own story to tell: a story born of ignorance, trailing a
lingering regret. Her story was inspired by events surrounding a family who lived
briefly in the district in which I grew up and where Blue Horses is set. They dwelt
in the shadows of my childhood and I knew I had to go into the shadows to find
them, to give them fictional life.
I turned to the writings of the original Shadow Master, Carl Gustav Jung,
pioneer of Analytical Psychology. As a writer, I intuitively responded to his
concepts of the Shadow Archetype and the collective unconscious, finding they
informed not only my developing creative work, but also my writing process. Like
writer Ursula Le Guin (1979), I saw “embracing the Shadow” as a catalyst for
growing up and growing wise, not only for my young adult protagonist, but also for
myself as a writer. ‘Me and my shadow’ were keen to dance to Jung’s tune, but we
kept tripping over a generalized anxiety that Jung was out of step with the times. In
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
255
Part One of this dissertation, my Literature Review interrogates those concerns: has
Jung become old in our post-modern, post-structuralist world? How does feminism
come to terms with a theorist who preaches that we listen to the “Great Man
Within”? What can a theorist who concentrated on the second half of life offer to a
writer of Young Adult literature? And finally, why choose the Jungian Shadow
when Kristeva’s concept of the Abject covers some similar territory in
encompassing our experience of difference and other, but has garnered more critical
attention in analyses of young adult literature?
In Part Two, “Growing Up and Growing Wise,” I compare and contrast
Jungian and Kristevan analyses using two contemporary Australian novels: Walking
Naked by Alyssa Brugman and Sleeping Dogs by Sonya Hartnett. The former
demonstrates the use of the Shadow as a catalyst for individuation in young adult
fiction; the latter, while heavy in shadow imagery, does not. In Sleeping Dogs, the
abject rules, providing a meaningful contrast to both Walking Naked and my own
creative work and search for meaning as a writer.
Part Three, “The Heart of the Stone,” is a reflective examination of my
creative work and process, which provides the final justification for my use of a
Shadow framework. The interplay between my exegetical work and my creative
praxis is similar to what Jung (1916) termed “active imagination” and what
Madeline Sonik, writing in the Jung e-journal, called a “productive dialogue”
between conscious intent and the unconscious (2006 p 2).
I see my work as fitting into Haseman’s (2006) definition of Performative
Research, with my creative work Blue Horses and my exegesis Illuminating the
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
256
Shadow, “not only express[ing] the research, but in that expression, become[ing] the
research itself” ( p 5). The creative work is the star of the show and the exegesis, its
loyal servant, scurrying back and forth, meeting and often anticipating its mistress’
needs. An unexpected and pleasing outcome of this process has been seeing the
exegesis gradually emerge from the shadows, to stand proud, confident in its own
character, dignity and purpose in informing my creative process, to share this stage
with its mistress.
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
257
Part One - Literature Review
(i) Grappling with Shadows
Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s
conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion
It takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the
problems it raises.
M-L von Franz, The Process of Individuation
The Shadow runs like a current through the writings of Carl Gustav Jung,
enlivening the threshold between the conscious and unconscious. It encompasses
the dark unknown in all its manifestations: the “invisible saurian tail” of modern
man, “the sinister and frightful brother;” the “dark, inferior and undifferentiated part
of the personality …all those tendencies that run counter to the dominant cultural
canons of a given society,” as well as evil in all forms (cited in Connolly, 2003 p
413).
A century after Jung began to articulate his concept of the Shadow, it
continues to resonate with me as a person and as a writer. Now in that second half
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
258
of life that so fascinated Jung, I find myself drawn to explore the very area rejected
in my youth as navel-gazing and self-indulgent: the dark continent of the Self. As
my writing developed, it demanded more than a familiarity with the surface terrain,
the peaks and valleys of lived experience; it needed to tap into the subterranean
roiling forces capable of vomiting up volcanic outbursts, compressing detritus into
diamond and forcing up ranges of behaviour unexpected in the placid landscape of
the everyday. It needed to turn inward to find explanations for life’s outward
manifestations.
Psychoanalysis provided trail-blazers in the exploration of the human
psyche: Sigmund Freud, who saw the personal unconscious as an underworld of
repressed desires; and Jung, his erstwhile student, for whom the unconscious was
infinitely richer - a vast resource with the potential to be friend, guide and adviser to
the conscious ego (Jung, 1964 p 12). The pair’s famous split, ostensibly over libido
as a driving force in life, now seems inevitable given the underlying differences in
their philosophical approaches to life (Jung, 2001 p 123).
Freud’s theoretical emphasis on the significance of the personal past was in
strong contrast to Jung’s future-oriented views (Kerr, 1988 p 23). Jung believed his
former mentor over-emphasized the pathological aspects of life and interpreted man
too exclusively in the light of his defects (2001 p 119). He saw human beings as not
just a function of their past, but as the engineers of their own destiny - if they could
get their conscious ego to listen to the unconscious and learn from it. He saw Freud
as spiritually stunted and believed that individuals in the modern world needed to
rediscover the life of the spirit: “It is the only way in which we can break the spell
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
259
that binds us to the cycle of biological events” (2001 p 124). These words resound
with particular intensity in today’s grim botoxed reality, where the collective
consciousness prefers facial paralysis to laugh lines and fends off age with
sharpened scalpels and hypodermics filled with botulism toxicity.
Jung sought to untangle such complexities of the human psyche through the
Analytical Psychology that he founded. His exploration of the worlds of dreams,
art, literature, religion and philosophy led writer Ursula Le Guin to call him “the
psychologist whose ideas on art are the most meaningful to most artists” (1979 p
62). His enduring contributions include the concept of the collective unconscious
and its archetypes, which include the Shadow. The collective unconscious is “that
part of the psyche that retains and transmits the common psychological inheritance
of mankind” (Jung, 1964 p 107). In the snappier parlance of Wikipedia, it is the
“DNA of the human psyche” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_psychology,
13 May 2007). Jung saw the archetype as an “irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-
existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can
therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time” (1989 p 392).
For writers such as Le Guin, the collective unconscious provides a rich
respite from the lonely crowd of the collective consciousness; it is that place “where
we all meet … the source of true community; of felt religion; of art, grace,
spontaneity and love. How do we get there? ….Jung says the first step is to turn
around and follow your own shadow” (1979 p 63). Before I could do that, I had to
confront some uncomfortable realities arising from using a theorist who
philosophically genuflected to “the Great Man Within” (Jung, 1964 p 173). Like Le
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
260
Guin, I responded to him as an artist, but as a feminist, I had to interrogate anxieties
arising from the suspicion that Jung had become “old” in our post-structuralist,
post-modern world.
(ii) Re-visioning Jung
Post-Jungian writers such as Andrew Samuels (1985) have long recognized the
need to “correct” Jung’s “outmoded and unacceptable” attitudes to women, non-
whites and so-called “primitive” cultures. He argues that when this is done, one can
then appreciate Jung’s prescience regarding issues such as gender, race, nationalism
and cultural analysis, which have become the focus of psychological thought in the
decades following his death (cited in Baumlin, 2005 p 1). A common theme in the
literature is that in order to use Jung, one must accept the need to re-vision, re-read,
or even, according to one author, “intentionally misread” his theories: “[his] model
of the psyche … could be described as postmodern, a view of the self that
recognizes diversity and difference rather than unity and coherence … but Jung’s
work is not often read in this way” (Jensen, 2002 cited in Baumlin pp 1,2).
In her book Jungian Archetypes in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction
Lorelei Cederstrom argues that Jungian thought is both intuitive and symbolic and
as such is “particularly well-suited to describing the elements of literature, which
like dreams, resonate with a wealth of personal, cultural, religious and
psychological meaning” (2002 pp 4,5). However as a feminist, she has been
repeatedly challenged for using “such an outmoded and male oriented paradigm as
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
261
Jungian theory to explore the female psyche” (p 2). Her book seeks to answer that
challenge, following in the wake of numerous feminist re-visions of Jungian
thought which began “by separating his theories from the masculinist biases of the
culture in which he was writing” and which are now contributing to an evolving
framework “within which feminists, Jungians and literary researchers can find a
common ground” (p 3). Cederstrom contends that Jung’s theory is flexible and open
to re-visions, quoting Jung himself: “The most we can do is to dream the myth
onwards and give it a modern dress” (1970 p 45). She believes that “the creative
imaginative universe of the woman novelist” is where Jung can be re-visioned to
more accurately depict women’s experience and “dream the myths of women
forward” (p 5). In examining key works of adult literature by prominent women
writers such as Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, Cederstrom
finds that the Shadow plays a strong role in all phases of a woman’s life (p 33) but
like Jung, she had little to say about the adolescent phase.
(iii) Fangs & Pimples & claws & all - Individuation and young adults
[The normal adolescent] sees his shadow as much blacker, more
wholly evil, than it is. The only way for a youngster to get past the
paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look
at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimples and claws
and all – to accept it as himself – as part of himself. The ugliest
part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. …of the
journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood. (Le Guin, The Child and
the Shadow, 1979 p 65)
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
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Jung believed that the ego’s first encounter with the shadow during
adolescence kick-started the process of individuation, or psychological maturation.
People could only become happy, whole and productive when that process was
complete and “the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and
to complement one another” (1964 p 14). However, Jung, like Cederstrom’s
favoured writers, was far more interested in what happened in middle age, when the
shadow had become “blacker and denser” after inferior and incompatible elements
of the psyche had been ignored and repressed for decades (1938 p 131).
As a writer of young adult fiction, I wanted to explore that first encounter
with the Shadow: the point at which the egocentricities of childhood come up hard
against a developing awareness of self and other. I believe, as does Ursula Le Guin,
that this landscape of youth provides fertile soil in which the Shadow can take root
and grow. However, we part company on the issue of how this can be explored
through genre-based literature. Le Guin sees Fantasy as the “appropriate” language
in which to tell stories about evil to young people; realistic fiction, she says, is “the
very hardest media in which to do it.” She argues this is because evil is not a
problem with a solution, but at the same time, she believes it would be unethical to
present the child with evil as an insoluble problem: “What then,” she asks “is the
naturalistic writer for children to do?” (p 69-70)
My response is that naturalistic writers for young adults can utilize the
Shadow because it is such a richly nuanced, multi-dimensional concept, not a
reductionist one found only at the wrong end of a good-evil spectrum. The Shadow
encompasses a rich conceptual framework for realistic young adult fiction wherein
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
263
hidden aspects of the personal and collective unconscious can be revealed through
dreams, fantasies or personal relationships – it does not need to be reduced to a
battle between good and evil.
The Shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge
about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or
indirectly – for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible
tendencies… The shadow behaves compensatorily to consciousness; hence
its effects can be positive as well as negative. (Jung, 1989 p 399)
The Shadow not only encompasses “other,” with all the conflicts and
ambiguities that attract, repel and confront the normal adolescent, it also acts as the
catalyst that initiates what Jung calls individuation: that coming to terms with a
fuller understanding of Self that is part of growing up and growing wise.
In following my shadow, I depart from recent scholarship in the area of
literary criticism and young adult fiction, which has drawn heavily on
psychoanalysis and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection (Kidd, 2004 p 109; Wilkie-
Stibbs, 2006). For Kristeva, the abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order.
What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the
composite …The jettisoned object that is radically excluded, which draws towards
the place where meaning collapses” [my italics] (1982 cited in Connolly p 415). By
way of contrast, I explore in my writing a place where meaning coalesces for my
adolescent protagonist - in her encounter with the Shadow, where the conscious and
unconscious collide - providing a catalyst for greater self-knowledge and personal
growth in her journey towards a more fully-realized Self.
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
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Connolly captures a key difference between the shadow and the abject in her
exploration of the differing theoretical approaches of Freud, Kristeva and Jung in
relation to terror, concluding that abjection is essentially linked to the conservative
manoeuvre of closure. She contends that “the ritual contact with abjection and the
subsequent collapse of boundaries that separate self and other is temporary and its
function is the final and more radical exclusion of the other and the strengthening of
boundaries and the symbolic order” (2003 p 415). She compares this with Jungian
thought that sees in the encounter with the Shadow the “possibility of widening the
boundaries of ego consciousness and of integration of ‘otherness’” (p 407). Rather
than excluding the other, it can learn from otherness and incorporate it into a more
fully realized concept of Self.
Kristeva does not discount learning from the abject, calling it “that which
must be driven away and that which is cast out; but challenges from its place of
banishment and does not cease to challenge its master” (Kristeva, 1982 p 70). This
symbolic shadowing of the abject continued to challenge me as a writer, as I
reflected on and applied shadow and abject concepts to case studies from young
adult literature.
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
265
Part Two - Growing up and Growing Wise
(i) Walking Naked by Alyssa Brugman
There are those that are popular.
There are those that are outcasts.
And there are those who must choose between the two.
(http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385731157)
Walking Naked was an Honour Book for Older Readers in the CBCA Book of the
Year Awards in 2003 and was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary
Award for Young Adult fiction in the same year. I found it an instructive example
of how the Jungian concept of the Shadow can be a powerful catalyst for
individuation in realistic young adult literature.
Fifteen year old Megan Tew, is part of “The Group,” the smug, popular set at
school that carries out “Interventions” on its own members if they fail to conform to
the group’s exacting standards. Megan is the group’s power broker and co-founder,
along with Candice, her best friend since kindergarten. Candice is the beauty;
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
266
Megan, the brains and their careful recruitment strategies ensure neither is ousted
from their privileged positions astride the unruly animal that is high school politics.
Megan’s Machiavellian tendencies plant the seed for revolt within the ranks,
however, she is clever enough to contain any dissent, until she ends up side-lined
from her power base, in lunch-time detention with the school outcast, Perdita.
The Group projects its own nastiness and fear of difference onto Perdita,
labelling her “the Freak” and vilifying her by hearsay: “She said weird things,
sometimes in Old English …I heard she was part of a cult … a witch … I heard that
she smelt … she didn’t wash or brush her hair and that once someone had seen a
tiny cockroach scuttle down behind her left ear…” (Brugman, 2002 p 8).
Perdita is a difficult, spiky personality, at odds with high school and
everyone in it. Her only real companion in life is poetry because it proves she’s not
completely alone in the world: everything she feels, someone has felt before ( pp
81-82). In detention, Megan discovers the Freak is freakishly smart, gifted in fact.
Perdita reaches out to her, and as Megan’s position in the group erodes, a
surreptitious relationship, not quite a friendship, develops between the two. At
Megan’s insistence, it is forced to exist in the shadows, away from the lonely crowd
of the group’s collective consciousness: “I explained to Perdita that I couldn’t see
her at school…. My position in the group made it impossible” (p 77).
Megan gets glimpses into the Freak’s life, lived in the shadow of a violent
home life and the cruelty of her classmates. Her understanding of other is expanded
as she is attracted by Perdita’s overweening intelligence, their truant excursions to
University and the broader intellectual experience on offer. At the same time, she is
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
267
repelled and at times, frightened by Perdita’s difference, by the strangeness in her
eyes: “They looked like the eyes of a dog that is biting you in play, but any moment
now is going to bite you for real” (p 135). When Megan is forced to choose between
Perdita and The Group, her decision precipitates a devastating encounter with the
Shadow, from which she eventually finds meaning and a way to recover and to
grow up, out of the shadow of group conformity, into a more fully realized human
being.
According to Le Guin, the weak ego, or one that is “offered nothing better,”
identifies with the collective consciousness which she defines as “all the little egos
added together, the mass mind, which consists of such things as cults, creeds, fads,
fashions, status-seeking, … popcult, all the isms, all the ideologies, all the hollow
forms of communication and “togetherness” that lack real communion or real
sharing” ( p 63). This is where Megan begins her journey. Isolated in detention,
excluded from the group’s inner sanctum, exposed to revelations about Perdita’s
intellect and personality, she literally turns away from the collective consciousness
represented by the group and follows her Shadow, personified by the subversive
Perdita, into a locked library and on truant excursions to the University. For Megan,
it is a doorway into the collective unconscious, where she begins to explore beyond
the boundaries of her privileged self-absorption, discovering poetry and the
possibility of a genuine intellectual life.
According to Von Franz it is our own actions which dictate whether the
shadow becomes our friend or enemy: “the shadow becomes hostile only when it is
ignored or misunderstood” (von Franz, 1964 p 173). Megan’s lack of commitment
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
268
to the relationship precipitates a frightening confrontation when Perdita refuses to
be banished back to the shadows. She parades her relationship with Megan,
triggering an Intervention by the Group. Forced to choose, Megan betrays Perdita’s
trust and sells her soul to the Group: “I knew right at that moment that if I could roll
back my life by thirty seconds I would do it differently” (Brugman, 2002 p 154).
Megan learns about grief and regret in the shattering climax to the novel.
She finally breaks away from the claustrophobic confines of the Group and attempts
to atone by organizing poetry nights as a symbolic way of honouring Perdita and
what she has learned from her. Megan is sadder and wiser at the novel’s end: “I
think she gave up on the world, and gave up on me, too soon. The thing that
disappoints me is that Perdita was not around to see that I too have learned the
enterprise in walking naked” (p 171).
In embracing the Shadow and “walking naked” without the protection of her
carefully cultivated group mask, Megan has transcended the limitations of her
former persona and grown into a more fully realized version of her true Self. It
could be argued that Perdita on the other hand, occupies a place of abjection after
facing “a hatred that smiles” and “a friend who stabs you” (Chanter, 2000 p 144);
she is what Kristeva argues is driven away “but challenges from its place of
banishment and does not cease to challenge its master” (1982 p 70). Perhaps this is
where the abject fails for me on a personal level: “Perdita was the most
uncompromising person I have ever met … It’s also the quality that made her
choose to die” (Brugman, 2002 p 171). Perdita’s refusal to embrace her own
shadow, to accept the dark truths about her own persona, meant that instead of
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
269
reaching for that chance to grow as a person, she chose obliteration. This erasure of
the identity of the subject engulfed by abjection (Wilson 2001) is something I wish
to discuss further in relation to Sleeping Dogs and as a point of departure in my own
creative work.
(ii) Sleeping Dogs by Sonya Hartnett
This 1996 winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Young Adult
fiction lends itself to comparative readings using the shadow and the abject, which I
found helpful in delineating my own conceptual framework.
Griffin Willow is a violent, domineering, alcoholic father of five grown
and half-grown children. He rules his isolated, dysfunctional family in rural
Australia, grubbing out a living from farming and a campground that no-one ever
visits twice. Griffin exemplifies just how black and dense a shadow can become
if ignored and repressed for a lifetime, grinding his wife into psychological
withdrawal and projecting his own shadow onto his sensitive and talented son,
Jordan, who he beats regularly and relentlessly - “Look at his brothers and sisters
– is this child mine?” - justifying the violence by objectifying its victim: “If he’s
mine I can do as I like with him” (Hartnett, 1995p 12).
The entire family is dark, literally and metaphorically: “The Willows have
black hair, all except Jordan, who is yellow as corn, and their fair, graying mother”
(Hartnett, 1995 p 11-12). Grace’s withdrawal to a “quiet, dim place that she found
greatly to her liking” ( p 15), allows her children to degenerate into a ragged pack,
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
270
uncared for and undefended, as wary of outsiders as it is oddly loyal to the vicious
top dog, Griffin.
One could be tempted to bring a Jungian analysis to this book with the
cataclysmic arrival of the itinerant artist called Fox. He is the Jungian Trickster
archetype who plays “malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to
the vengeance of those whom he had injured.” (Jung, 2003 p 160 para 457). Fox
enjoys stirring the pot: “He understands the value of his knowledge. This nasty,
narrow family needs a shaking” (Hartnett, 1995 p 85). His meddling in the family’s
dark and incestuous secrets unleashes a terrifying and humiliating attack from the
Willow pack. His malicious counter-strike is aimed at the family, but takes out only
one member: Jordan, who dies not knowing the one he loved best betrayed him. For
me, this novel is all about abjection, particularly in its portrayal of Jordan: the one
who disturbs the order of the family, doesn’t respect boundaries, sleeps with his
sister and becomes “the jettisoned object, the radically excluded” (Kristeva, 1982 p
2), shot down like a dog by his own father. The rest of the pack stays loyal,
concealing the crime and slinking away from the scene forever.
Kim Wilson’s analysis of abjection in three contemporary Australian young
adult novels supports the view that “the identity of the subject engulfed by abjection
will ultimately be erased” (2001 p 29-30). Sleeping Dogs fits into this conceptual
framework with fair Jordan finally expunged; closure for the Willow family, a final
and radical exclusion of “other” leading to a strengthening of boundaries and the
symbolic order of this dark and disturbing family. For me, the entire family is
engulfed by abjection and they prove it by disappearing at the novel’s end, erasing
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271
themselves from the scene of their crimes. They become “the jettisoned object that
is radically excluded, which draws towards the place where meaning collapses”
(Kristeva, 1982 p 2); a place where incest is somehow innocent, revelation begets
betrayal, ignorance and brutality triumph and evil escapes unpunished.
In many respects Sleeping Dogs is the antithesis to my own creative work:
the shadow side to the rural family I have created in Blue Horses. There is no
growing old for Jordan, as there is for Janeen and Aileen, no growing wise for any
of the characters from Bonaparte’s Farm, not even the meddlesome Bow Fox, who
at the novel’s end, escapes their dark and claustrophobic world ignorant of the death
he has precipitated: “And Bow actually smiles to remember the Willow family: he
is gracious enough to wish them luck” (Hartnett, 1995 p 130).
The abject in Sleeping Dogs continues to challenge long after the story ends,
despite, or perhaps because there is no promise of light shining at the end of this
dark tale. I respond as a reader to the abject, but as a writer, the Shadow conceptual
framework continues to resonate more clearly with my own creative work. Implicit
in the shadow is the existence of illumination and like the light at the end of Glenda
Simpson’s Dunhill, it calls to me and I follow.
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272
Part Three - Creative Reflection: The Heart of the Stone
…the unconscious surrounds us. It infuses what we think we know with
secrets and mysteries. Whether it is goal of our research, it is always the
secret companion of it. (Rowland, 2007 p 1)
I do not write because I must. I write because I can.
It started out as fun and games and almost ended in tears. The countless blue-
and-pink-lined exercise books filled with endless stories and decorated with daisies,
mutated over the years into clever essays written for the graded applause of teachers
and then into work, marked by advancement in salary and position, until my words
were no longer my own. They appeared in newspapers under other journalists’ by-
lines; in documents signed off by senior officers; on television and radio, being
mouthed by clients, while I, the invisible ventriloquist, kept to the shadows and
banked my fees. I became so alienated from the products of my own labour, that I
was relieved when the words disappeared completely, lost to the heady biscuity
delights of babies, gap-toothed smiles and happy husband pie, reappearing for
special cameo appearances at exclusive functions and consultancies, the odd
wedding, and finally, a funeral.
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Don’t die without doing what you were meant to do. Without being what you
were meant to be...
The words echoed in my head in the months after my father died. They
filled me with fear because they asked me to start thinking again, to strip off the
professional mask and dare to walk naked, baring whatever lay within. I dreamed of
releasing a writer, someone with her own words, her own voice, but dreaded
discovering the blank face of a cipher. Age brings the consolation of experience: I
knew fears multiplied when left to fester, so I reached out a tentative hand, lifted the
mask of my adult persona and found myself back at the beginning...
The journey
I chose a notebook festooned in tulips, the flower of my father’s homeland: free of
association with the computer-driven world of media releases and corporate PR;
redolent of the stories I so loved writing as a child. I went back into my own past in
an attempt to discover the lost voice that had come so effortlessly in my youth. Not
knowing where to start, I groped at the rough rock of my childhood, turning it over
and over in mind, trying to write my way into its heart.
At a conscious level I was trying to apply the skills I had to a new form.
Like a middle-aged stonemason contemplating an apprenticeship in sculpture, I
knew I had to free the figure in the stone, so I grabbed my tools and started
hammering away. I had a feeling for the raw material, a basic toolkit and a bit of
on-the-job training, but I had never attempted to create anything so fine, and
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
274
perhaps, most tellingly, I lacked any sense of a clear artistic vision. I was used to
working with templates or whacking together ephemera under deadline pressure.
Creating something infinitely more complex quickly depleted old skills and forced
me to develop what latent talents I had. I just kept hammering away until I had
exhausted all that I knew, then stepped back to view the product of my labour of
love. My first-born novel creation. My baby.
Like all new mothers, I was blinded by love, marveling at all those working
parts, oblivious to any imperfections. I was happy in my now computerized nest,
rhapsodizing over baby in 12 pt: Times New Roman or Arial? It looks great in both!
I tried to ignore the shadow flickering across the surface of my happiness, the
recurrent stab of fear at the thought of exposing my baby to the stares of others. I
dreaded the thought that I’d given birth to an FLK: funny looking kids belonged to
other people; I couldn’t bear to think that I might have one too. Denial works for
only so long and the shadow was persistent, so I decided to give someone who
knew about babies a quick peek and see what they thought. I chose Linda Carroll
from Harper Collins for an editorial consultancy at the Queensland Writer’s Centre.
She beamed and urged me to enter Harper Collins’ very own baby show – the
Varuna Manuscript Development Awards. I was elated, but a little conflicted: after
all I’d only shown her the perfect little face, the adorable profile; I hadn’t told her
my baby was nearly two years old and still couldn’t stand on its own two feet. But I
did what new mothers do, repressed the fear and fussed about, primping and
preening my baby, before sending it off with whispered reassurances: “Don’t worry
if you don’t win, Mummy still loves you!”
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
275
My baby came home with a ribbon: short-listed along with more than a
dozen others in the 2006 Varuna Manuscript Awards. It didn’t win. The experience
filled me with hope and despair and fueled a growing private conviction that there
really was something wrong with my beautiful baby.
I sent it off to the specialists, Driftwood Manuscript Appraisal, for a drawn-
out diagnosis that confirmed my worst fears: “This assessment will probably strike
the author as rather harsh, but ….” The anonymous nine page assessment listed in
excruciating detail my failings as a mother and concluded that my baby could not
possibly survive without major surgery:
I found the story of Janeen and her sister quite moving, but coming far too
late in its exposition to have much impact, and I can see how if the writer re-
thinks the manuscript and puts this story at the core of her narrative, and its
subsequent effects on her main character, then her next draft will take great
leaps forward as a piece of engaging fiction for older adolescent readers
(Driftwood Manuscript Assessment 2006 p 9).
I cried. Not out of grief, for my poor twisted baby, but out of pity for myself.
Did I have the strength, the will, to start again? To rethink my protagonist, my
narrative? To junk an 80,000-word manuscript that had taken me three part-time
years to write? The answer was obvious before the tears had even dried: I was a
mother; I would do whatever was necessary to make my baby whole and launch it
into the world.
*
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
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Venero Armanno (2006) writes of a young builder proudly showing off the glass
brick wall he’d built in Veny’s bathroom. It looked beautiful, but if you leant on it,
everything came crashing down. An older professional pointed out where he’d gone
wrong and explained how to fix it, then left the young builder to take it apart, brick
by brick and start again, from scratch. “He didn’t complain, but he did learn a great
deal” ( p 16).
I too have learnt a great deal since devoting 2007 to dismantling that first
draft and rewriting it from scratch. The MA cohort in Youth Writing at QUT taught
me to think critically about what I was doing and why. The Queensland Writers
Centre’s 2007 Year of the Novel with Venero Armanno taught me just about
everything else I should have known (and didn’t) before setting out on this fictional
journey. The synergies helped shape my creative work at a conscious level.
Ironically, much of that conscious intent grew out of two months I spent
away from the creative work, struggling in the murky waters of literary theory and
attempting to define my conceptual framework. Academic immersion almost ended
in a drowning, before I surfaced, spluttering, with a Jungian lifeline gripped in my
hand. It was an intriguing choice - there is little of the mystic in my character - but I
couldn’t ignore the fact that the Shadow concept resonated so clearly my ears were
ringing.
The story that became Blue Horses found me the moment I typed the words:
“Sis, you’ve got Aileen Kapernicke’s germs!” It brought back with stunning clarity
the shadow of a lonely child in the playground, the outcast, the “other” onto whom
in our ruthless innocence we projected our own dark and frightful fears: “They had
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
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fat sandwiches for lunch. Hardly any meat on them at all. Just fat. And Aileen kills
flies-”
Recognise it? We all do. I have not yet met a single individual who could
not tell me the full name, christian name and surname - of that archetypal child,
lonely and despised, who inhabited the landscape of their youth. They are
unforgettable because they personify our fears about everything we don’t want to be
and because later, too late to make a difference, we can see from the lofty heights of
adulthood, how we in our innocence and ignorance betrayed them, sometimes by
our actions, more often by simple inaction: sins of omission rather than
commission.
I initially saw the Shadow concept as a convenient “way in” to explaining
the relationship between my protagonist and antagonist, the visceral dislike that
feeds much of my plot conflict: rather than facing her own shortcomings, Cecilia
projects them onto the Kapernicke girls. I saw potential in developing their
relationship along the lines suggested by von Franz: “the function of the shadow is
to represent the opposite side of the ego and to embody just those qualities that one
dislikes most in other people.”(1964 p 173) I believed that Jung intuitively
understood what was needed to develop a “rounded” character – in fiction, as in
life: “we have a body, which, like all bodies, casts a shadow …if we deny this body,
we cease to be three-dimensional and become flat and without substance” (1992 p
30). With the bulk of my manuscript set in rural Queensland in the 1970s, at a time
when child abuse was a societal blind spot and casual violence against children
often passed without comment, I saw applications for personal and collective
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
278
aspects of the Shadow to add layers of meaning to plot, conflict development and
setting. I was particularly interested in exploring Le Guin’s proposition that
adolescent battles can play an important part in defining oneself as an adult: “So
that, when he grows up into his strength and responsibility as an adult in society, he
will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what he sees,
when he must face the evil that is done in the world”(1979 p 70). Le Guin, like
Jung, assumed the masculine. In using adolescent females as protagonist and
antagonist, I deliberately wanted to challenge that male assumption and use the
Shadow in young adult fiction aimed at young women, thereby contributing to an
evolving post-Jungian framework that better depicts female reality and experience.
I had it all planned and was therefore unprepared for the most potent and
unexpected outcome of my engagement with the literature. I found it informed not
only the writing of my manuscript, but also my development as a writer and an
individual. I was forced to confront my own shadow, which encompassed the
stunted, repressed “navel-gazing” that I had been so impatient with in my youth. As
I grew more thoughtful, my characters took on greater depth, showing a capacity for
introspection that had been quite foreign to me in the past. Writers are necessarily
limited by their own understanding of human nature: I felt that understanding
expanding with my research, and with it, my writing horizons.
Tessa Adams and Andrea Duncan (2003) in their book The Feminine Case –
Jung, Aesthetics and Creative Process consider creative process as “a
phenomenological and aesthetic engagement with the unconscious” (p1). Duncan
contends that women “have found through their own creativity an approach to
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
279
individuation which is authentic and in many ways as “other” to themselves” (p
148). I too have grown through my writing and through what I think of as the
creative dance between the conscious and unconscious parts of my psyche.
Madeline Sonik (2006), writing in Jung: the e-journal, describes how she
has used the Shadow in not only the production of works of fiction, but in
developing a creative relationship between ego intent and the unconscious. She
points out that in the production of literary works, writing does not issue from the
ego alone: the unconscious plays an important role, albeit an under-rated one in
many creative writing classes ( p 2). I have discovered it is no easy task to learn
what Sonik calls allowing “ego consciousness to engage in a productive dialogue
with the unconscious” (p2). It can be kick-started by the “loose construing” that
writer Libby Hathorn advocates for clearing the debris of writer’s block (QUT
Youth Writing Workshop 2007). However it involves a deeper engagement with,
and honest appraisal of, motivations and needs, in order to enrich one’s writing by
developing conscious ways of recognizing and delivering unconscious contents. I
have learnt to trust my creative instincts when it comes to problem solving,
consciously stirring the bubbling brew of the unconscious, then leaving it to stew
for as long as it takes, trusting that the solution will float to the surface eventually.
Jung (1916) in his essay The Transcendent Function called this “active
imagination” whereby a creative dialogue opens between the conscious and
unconscious “in which now one side takes the lead, now the other (paras. 181ff),
until a “third thing” is formed that represents a union of the two parts (para. 189).
Bongers Illuminating the Shadow
280
This is the transcendent function, which “manifests itself as a quality of conjoined
opposites”(cited in Stein, 2005 p 11).
In confronting shadow aspects of my own personality, I have found a
writing self that is “other,” which transcends the limitations of the professional
persona I had adopted in the past. Jung argues that the “other may be just as one-
sided in one way as the ego is in another. And yet the conflict between them may
give rise to truth and meaning – but only if the ego is willing to grant the other its
rightful personality” (1940 p 237).
Like other writers using Jungian or post-Jungian frameworks, I have
discovered synchronicities that enrich my understanding, and enjoyment of my
own writing. Early in my manuscript’s development, I was inspired by a Central
Queensland rock hound’s famous find: an ordinary stone that when cut and
polished revealed a stunning image of a galloping blue horse at its heart. I saw
this as a metaphor for the hidden beauty and meaning that can be found in the
most unlikely place or, person, relationship or life. My exegetical research
subsequently revealed that the stone is the highest and most enduring symbol of
the true Self (Jung, 1964 p 208-09). While I had been busily polishing the rough
rock of my childhood so that I could show its hidden shining face to the world, I
didn’t understand on a conscious level that I was trying to write my way into my
own heart. My creative work is called Blue Horses because it comes from the
heart of the stone, the depths of my true self, and symbolizes the beauty and
meaning at the heart of both my creative piece and exegesis.
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Conclusions
Creative people fall into an area of themselves that is not part of the
knowable conscious Self.
David Malouf, Brisbane Writer’s Festival, 2007
My investigation into the use of the Shadow Archetype in writing young adult
literature involved a twelve-month spiral of writing, researching, reflection,
critique, feedback and rewriting. That period taught me that the conscious ego
provides intent and control in structuring the story and reining in unruly story
elements. However, it does not produce the magic; that comes from the
unconscious.
Creative writing is a numinous blend of craft (the conscious shaping of
language and story) and art (the harnessing of unconscious contents, pointing them
in the right direction and letting them have their head). A wild creative ride often
takes my story somewhere I had not intended to go. Sometimes it is a pointless
detour that at least serves to contribute to my mental map of places to avoid in the
future. Other times it takes the story to a breathtaking place that is so perfect I
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would have chosen it myself had I only “known” in a conscious way, that it was
there.
I am learning to listen to my unconscious and trust my writing instincts, the
intuitive feel for the rhythm of language and story, knowing that the resolution will
come to me, eventually. Critical feedback has played an important part in my
learning process with an independent appraisal on a first draft, most useful on
structure and intent, and peer critiquing most useful at the micro-level during the re-
write process.
Any writing process is idiosyncratic: mine is not unlike doing a 50,000 piece
jigsaw puzzle, just harder. There is no template to go by, only a shifting internal
vision. All the pieces are there, either on the surface or just below it; I have to find
them and put them together in a way that works for me, trusting in my ability to
produce a meaningful vision by the end. Clarity develops with the work: any artistic
vision missing in the mad scramble for a first draft, comes together like iron filings
drawn to some mysterious magnetic design, during the re-writing process.
I write most days while my children are at school, the constant practice
improving my ear for the rhythm of language and story. I hear the plink, plink,
plink, of the words as they fall onto the page; listening for that false note that might
take a reader out of the world I am creating. I have become both more sensitive as a
writer, achieving that distance that allows me to know when something isn’t
working, and more resilient, less personally wounded by criticism. I have come to
thank that anonymous 2006 assessor from Driftwood for her admittedly harsh but
fair analysis. Nietzsche was right: anything that doesn’t kill you makes you
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stronger. I have become stronger, more resilient and determined. I am not deterred
by Veny Armanno (2007) saying he wrote a million words before his first novel
was published, or by the expert studies that quote 10,000 hours or 10 years of
maximal effort and deliberate practice to master a skill (Ericsson, 1993). Hours
spent in the flow pass quickly: these days a shadow at my back startles me; I stare
uncomprehendingly at little figures in uniform wondering what they are doing there
– “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you at school?” The answer is always the same. It’s
3 o’clock. I’ve missed lunch. Again.
*
The final piece of the jigsaw is now in place. I understand what my father tried to
tell me about myself before he died. It took me four years to pay him back for the
1985 Diahatsu Charade he helped me to buy. It took me even longer to finish this,
my first novel manuscript. As I type these last words, I thank him for prodding me
into exploring my latent talents and for reminding me what a determined little cuss I
have always been: I finish what I start and I always pay my debts. For more than 30
years I have owed something to a memory of two little girls in a dusty playground:
one clutching a daisy-covered notebook filled with stories, the other, a shadowy
figure, standing alone, at the edge of the play. That long-standing debt has now
been repaid.
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