Carl Gustav Jung
The Duke of Dark Corners
Individuation
• Is a journey through
life towards
wholeness/ selfhood
• To reach wholeness
one must reconcile the
series of opposing
forces in life
• It is important to
achieve balance- a
middle ground
Reconciling Opposites
• Some common
oppositions include:
• Good-evil
• Extrovert-introvert
• Masculine-feminine
• Think-feel
• Birth-death
• Animal-spiritual
Equivalence and Entropy
• Increase in one area
(eg.think) means decrease
in another (eg.feel)
• The distribution of energy
in the psyche seeks an
equilibrium or balance
• The ideal state of selfhood
is balanced but not
conflict free
Transcendent Function
• The joining of various
opposing forces into a
coherent middle
ground.
• The Mandala- the
magic circle is the
symbol for wholeness
and perfection
Jung’s Psyche
T h e P syche
E go
P e rson a l Un co nscio us
C o lle ctive U n con scio us
Ego
• The conscious mind
• Like Freud’s ego it is
the part of our psyche
that is above the
surface
Personal Unconscious
• Repressed memories/
images unique to an
individual
• Forgotten unpleasant
elements which
require some digging
to be brought to the
surface
Collective Unconscious
• Our psychic
inheritance
• We are born with a
reservoir of
experiences faced by
the human race
• Jung sees a
relationship between
individual dreams and
the myths of peoples
Archetypes
• An archetype is an
inherited predisposition to
respond to certain aspects
of the world
• Powerful patterns of
action, creation and
organization
• Through dreams, myths,
stories, and works of art
they emerge into
consciousness as recurrent
images
The Persona
• It represents the way
we present ourselves
to the outside world
• Comes from the Latin
word for ‘mask’
• It is necessary to make
a good impression but
it may also be a false
impression
The Self
• Represents the centre and
the totality of the entire
psyche
• Goal of living is to realize
the self
• The God/ divine imageultimate archetype is the
self
• The more self-like you
are, the less selfish you are
• Could be image of wind, a
dove, Holy Grail, circle,
cross, especially the
Mandala
The Shadow
• The potential of
experiencing the
unconscious
• It may appear as chaos,
evil, a threat, or a
destructive forcewilderness, dark woods,
witch, criminal
• The dark side of the self –
we must acknowledge our
shadows to achieve
wholeness
The Trickster
• Role is to hamper the
individual’s progress
• May appear as a jester
or magician
The Anima or Animus
• The soul – anima, the
male soul; animus, the
female soul
• Our soul is our inner
gender opposite
• It is important to get in
touch with this aspect of
our self if we are to
achieve wholeness
• It is responsible for our
love life-we are always
looking for our other half
• Love at first sight is
almost always
anima/animus love
Chapter 2
• Dunny sets forth his purpose in writing this
memoir to the Headmaster (later says it’s to be
read only after his death)
• Angry at the patronizing/dismissive “farewell to
the Cork” tone of Packer’s summing up of him
• 10 books, contributions to Analecta Bollandiana,
‘cast by Fate for the vital though never glorious
role of Fifth Business’ (15)
• Packer a “religious illiterate”(15)
• Dunny’s view of humanity: boys are
miniature men
• Circumstances surrounding his retirement:
Dunny’s recent heart attack as Asst. Head
and Sr.History Master after the death of
lifelong friend Boy Staunton, chairman of
the board of school, D.S.B., C.B.E.
Chapter 3
• Description of small-town life in early 2th century in
Deptford (Thamesville), pop. 500, 15 miles from Pittstown
(London).
• Scots (D’s mother and father) looked up to as arbiters of
“common sense, prudence, and right opinions on virtually
everything”(18).
• Mr.Ramsay chief mechanic, printer, publisher, and editor
of The Deptford Banner
• Mrs.Ramsay has the cleanest privy in Deptford
• Deptfordians look down on Bowles Corner (pop. 150)
inhabitants as hopelessly rustic.
Chapter 4
• Mrs.Ramsay the “high priestess” attending and
orchestrating the birth of Paul Dempster 80 days premature
• Paul’s appearance: “looked so wretched that the doctor
and my mother were frightened” (19) red, wrinkled like a
tiny man, disproportionate, cry like mewing of kitten
(20),hieous, misshapen (21)
• Amasa prays that God take Mary and Paul to Him
• “one of those people who seem fated to be hurt and thrown
aside in life though…thought himself as important an actor
as any of the others” (22) “We rarely recognize it when we
are indeed supporting characters or even supernumeraries”
(22)
Percy vs. Dunny over guilt
• Difference between
Dunny and Percy over the
snowball: Dunny
overcome with guilt, but
Percy denies it. “I knew
that he was afraid, and I
knew that he would fight,
lie, do anything rather
than admit what I
knew….So I was alone in
my guilt, and it tortured
me” (23)
Dunny’s guilt
• “Whoever did it, the Devil guided his hand.”
• Second reference to supernatural intervention –
Jung’s idea of “synchronicity”
• Dunny doubly guilty: first about the deed (even
though he didn’t do it has to assume the guilt that
Percy won’t) and secondly about covering it up
Chapter 5
• Mary has a “face like a pan of milk”(25)
• With Paul, “she was as delighted as a little
girl with a doll”
• Suspicion that Mary is “simple” –
breastfeeding unabashedly, gives away
everything, laughs like a girl, soft voice,
delicacy of expression, waving tendrils of
hair – utterly unsuitable for a parson’s wife.
Chapter 6
• Dunny assigned job of being unofficial watchdog of Mary
and Paul
• “Nursie” vs. “Pidgy Boy Boy”
• “He and I were rivals, for though I had none of his graces
of person or wealth, I had a sharp tongue. I was rawboned and wore clothes that had often made an earlier
appearance on Willie, but I had a turn for sarcastic
remarks, which were know to our group as ‘good ones’.
• ‘I thought I was in love with Leola….But, looking back on
it now, I know I was in love with Mrs. Dempster. (30)
• Milo Papple “bughouse” joke – Dunny’s cork retort.
Chapter 7
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Isolation from other boys resulting
from his allegiance to Mary
Dempster
Library job opens him up to world
of wonders – Robert-Houdin’s The
Secrets of Stage Conjuring and
Professor Hoffmann’s Modern
Magic and Later Magic.
“As soon as saw them I knew that
fate meant them for me. By
studying them I should become a
conjurer, astonish everybody, win
the breathless admiration of Leola,
and become a great power.” (33)
Explain the appeal of magic for
Donny
The Devouring Mother
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“She had missed the egg”(35)
Comment on the imagery, connotative diction in the description of the fight
between Mrs. Ramsay and Dunny
“I know Ill never have another anxious moment with own dear laddie.”
“How could I reconcile this motherliness with the screeching fury who had
pursued me round the kitchen with a whip, flogging me until she was gorged
with –what? Vengeance ? What was it?
Thought he knew reading Freud – now not so sure, but “what I knew then was
that nobody – not even my mother –was to be trusted in a strange world that
showed very little of itself on the surface.”
“It was necessary for me to gain power in some realm which my parents –
especially my mother – could not follow me.” (Magic)
“I yearned for my mother’s love and hated myself for having grieved her, but
quite as often I recognized that her love had a high price on it and that her idea
of a good son was a pretty small potato.”
One view of faith
• “My teaching abilities had their first airing in that little
library, and as I was fond of lecturing, I taught Paul more
than I suspected” s(37)
• A Child’s Book of Saints: “We are only little babies to
Him; we do not understand Him at all….He does not
always answer our prayers in the way we would like, but in
some but in some better way than we know…He is just a
dear old Father” It was a fervent wish that He would come
again : “People would not be so cruel to him now. Queen
Victoria would not allow anyone to crucify him” (38)
• “Like this?” he said, taking the coin from my and
performing the pass perfectly…that was the moment I
became Paul's instructor” – Fifth Business
Thinking vs. Feeling
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How does Amasa use his collar and position to get at Dunny and Mary?
Dunny’s “froward mouth”; Amasa’s “heavy cross”
Pride posing as humility
Amasa a “feeler” rather than a “thinker” like Dunny and Dunny has learned
not to trust strong emotionalism
Card playing “the Devil’s picture book”; Books about saints was a vile
superstition from the Scarlet Woman of Rome (Roman Catholic Church)
“it seemed tome that Arabian Nights and the Bible were getting pretty close”
“But I had been worsted by moral bullying, b y Deptford’s conviction that he
was right and I was wrong, and that gave him an authority over me based on
feeling rather than reason it was my first encounter with the emotional power
of popular morality” (43)
The Pit as a Protestant Hell
• Note imagery in this passage as narrator develops
the atmosphere of this desolate place: description
of the homeless men driven to madness with
alcohol abuse and open air living; the “jungles”,
tramps’ bivouacs, the picture of Mrs. D. and the
tramp copulating in the bleak, flat light of the
flashlight. (47)
• “He was very civil, ‘Masa. And he wanted it so
badly.”
Chapter 11
• View of townspeople:it was consensual;Amasa
could lay no charges. Dr.MacCausland said such
conduct indicated a “degeneration of the
brain...probably progressive”(48)
• Amasa resigns as Baptist parson
• Mr.Ramsay’s desire to help out family financially
causes huge quarrel with Mrs.Ramsay; her
charitable façade is hypocritical – cp.Deptford’s
tolerance of Cece Athelstan but not of Mary
• The shivaree where Amasa shows his moral
cowardice
What does Dunny see in
Mary?
• She was a wise woman..”had a breadth of outlook and clarity of vision
that were strange and wonderful”….”It was her lack of fear, of
apprehension, of assumption that whatever happened was inevitably
going to lead to some worse state of affairs, that astonished me and
enriched me” (52)
• “She was wholly religious. seemed to live in a world of trust that had
nothing of the stricken, lifeless, unreal quality of religion about
it….She lived by a light that arose from within…it seemed to be
something akin to the splendours I found in books” (53)
• “I regarded her as my greatest friend, and the secret league between us
was the tap-root that fed my life.”
• The other side of the coin: disordered cottage, Paul pitifully neglected
in appearance, her encounter with the tramp. “I decided that this
unknown aspect must be called madness” (57).
Chapter 12
• Dunny as a polymath; seen as a smart alec
• Encounter with the village atheist who laughs at the ludicrous “facts”
of the Bible; but Dunny sees that atheists ar too literal – the Bible and
Arabian Night are fabulous (fables) – full of metaphor which speak
psychological truth if not literal truth
• Leola now the village beauty, and Percy’s girl
• Milo Papple develops his comic repertoire further through comic
parody rather than breaking wind at will
• Percy and Mabel Heighington caught “in flagrante delicto”
• Leola forgave Percy “which made me cynical about women” (57)
• Percy sent to Colborne College away from Mabel and where his
mother couldn’t baby him
• Doc Staunton becoming a Sugar King (made a lot of money in sugar
beets)
Chapter 13
• Willie’s accident in the printing press and immersions
• “From two to three I sat in Willie’s room reading and between three
and half past I did what I could for Willie while he died” (59). – great
example of anticlimax and understatement
• Mary’s intervention: her complete lack of self-consciousness: hoisting
, up her skirts, running through the streets, praying, holding his hand,
later blowing him kisses:: “Willie sighed and moved his legs a little. I
fainted.”
• “…what possessed me to turn to that woman, an insane degenerate,
and bring herinto this house…?”
• Doc MacCausland’s theory about "clenched hands”.
• Mary’s second miracle? What is her first
Chapter 14
• “It was clear that she now regarded a hint of tenderness toward Mrs.
Dumpster as disloyalty to herself” (63)
• “Deep inside, I knew that to yield and promise what she wanted would
be the end of anything that was good in me.”
• “I made a third choice.” –decides to enlist underage, breaking ties with
family – a symbolic separation from Deptford
• “There’s just one thing to remember; whatever happens, it does no
good to be afraid.”
• “In spite of her best efforts to keep the image of Percy bright in her
heart, she discovered she really loved me, and would love me forever,
and wait until I returned from the battlefields of Europe” (66)
2: I am Born Again
• Life in war: note the verbal economy with which
Davies characterizes this period of abject misery
and boredom:
• Dunny reading the Bible, particularly The Book of
Revelations, the Crowned Woman standing on the
crescent moon-reminds him of the Arabian Nights
• Nicknames “Deacon” and “Charlie”
• “They could hardly conceive that anybody who
had read the Testament could be other than a Holy
Joe –could have another, seemingly completely
opposite side to his character.
2: Chapter 2
• November 1917, in
• the third battle of Ypres, when Canadians
attempted to take Passchendaele – Dunny’s
last battle in the Great War
• “I had a revolver, and shot all three at
point-blank range. They did not even see
me. There is no use in saying anything
more about it.”(75)
Mother Mary Comes to Me
• “For 3 years I had kept my nerve by stifling my intelligence, but now I
let the intelligence rip and the nerve dissolve I am sure there has been
more wretchedness, right and despair in world history, but I set up a
personal record that I have never since approached.”
• “…a statue of the Virgin and Child. .for the little Virgin was crowned,
stood on a crescent moon, which in turn rested on a globe, and in the
hand that did not hold the Child she carried a sceptre from which lilies
sprang.
• “But what hit me worse than the blow of the shrapnel was that the face
was Mrs. Dumpster's face.” (77) projection of his anima, a Virgin
Mary or mother figure personifying patience, faith, forbearance,
wisdom, lack of fear, when he needed these most.
• How similar or different is this psychologically from Elaine’s vision of
the Virgin Mary on the bridge?
2: Chapter 3
• Return from near-death: the hero undergoes
dismemberment ( loss of leg) and must dissociate from the
devouring mother. Parents were told he died before they
themselves died of the Spanish flu: “I was glad that I did
not have to be my mother's own dear laddie any longer…or
warp my nature to suit her confident demands. I knew she
had eaten my father, and I was glad and I didn’t have to
fight any longer to keep her from eating me.” (81)
• Diana marks him for her own – the Honorable and Canon
epitomize the upper middle class in their attitude to
sacrifices to be made in the war
2: Chapter 5
• Sexual initiation by Diana – connects it with his initiation
into culture, theatre when he saw the musical show “The
two, though very different, are not so unlike in
psychological weight as you might suppose. Both were
wonders, strange lands revealed to me in circumstances of
great excitement.”
• Epiphany when he receives the Victoria Cross from the
King: “We are public icons, we two: he an icon of
kingship, and I an icon of heroism, unreal yet necessary.”
Both recognize they are personas – hero and King by force
of circumstance or Fate.
2: Chapter 6
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“What was wrong between Diana and me was that she was too much of a
mother to me, and as I had had one mother, and lost her, I was not in a hurry to
acquire another—not even a young and beautiful one with whom I could play
Oedipus to both our hearts’ content.”
“How, I wondered, had I been so stupid as to get myself mixed up with such a
pinhead?” (89)-Leola
The break-up:" I was too intellectual, she said, and analyzed matters on which
feeling was the only true guide.” (91)Jung says if our dominant function is
thinking (conscious mind),our opposite function will be the dominant way the
unconscious mind works; however, it will be the weakest cognitive function of
which we are conscious.
After Dunstable’s symbolic death and escape from the devouring mother
through his night sea-voyage (“the healing sea”) he must re-enter his mother
(sexual union with Diana) to be reborn into a new orientation – breaks away
from Diana, and is rebaptized (Dunstan) by Diana and reborn (rebis)
2: Chapter 7
• Personas for Dunny and Percy (Venus and
Mars) and the love triangle
• confused feelings – doesn’t want Leola
(pinhead) but doesn’t want Boy to have her
(Boy is Dunny’s shadow – feels envy,
contempt, spite but doesn’t know why)
• Why does he find the “Hang the Kaiser!”
enactment so disturbing?
2: Chapter 8
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What did Dunny go into his old house to get?
Significance of the conversation he has with Ada Blake, Willie’s girlfriend?
Milo’s gossip about the townspeople updates us on the changes in the four years that
Dunny’s been away from Deptford:
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Leola
Boy
Dr Staunton
Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay
Paul
Mary
Amasa
In the Deptford mythology, Leola is the Sleeping Princess and Boy the Rich Young
Ruler archetype.
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“I boarded the train….and left Deptford in the flesh. It was not for a long time that I
realize that I never wholly left it in the spirit” (107)
3:Chapter 1
Dunny goes to U or T – major in History, M.A. – lonely
“Youth was not my time to flower.”
Percy Boyd is now Boy – persona of the twenties “zeitgeist”
– a dashing Scott Fitzgerald figure – knack for making
money
Dunny envious of his style, charisma,sex appeal yet glad of
his financial advice (ambivalence)
Boy an extrovert – girls, money, cars,,new challenges
Dunny an introvert – intellectual, spiritual,
,single
still misses Diana (hard to leave mother figure)
Boy as twice-born
• Boy is already rebaptized, although by himself
• in his second baptism,has left Deptford behind in
spirit, unlike Dunny
• “It was characteristic of Boy throughout his life
that he was always the quintessence of something
that somebody else had recognized and defined.”
(114)
• “Boy seemed to have made himself out of nothing,
and he was a marvel.” (114)
• Significance of new name?
3: Chapter 3
• Boy marries Leola (Prince marries the sleeping princess –
the Cruickshanks keeping Leola in erotic escrow for Boy
• Boy has already surpassed his father in wealth ad power
(symbolically slaying father)
• Boy and Dunny find themselves on the same ship
voyaging to Europe but not in the same class (symbolic of
their approach to life)
• Boy fascinated by Rev.Leadbeater’s view of Christ as a
Donald Trump of his time, materialism as beauty (rubies in
his handkerchief), and sentimentality as truth (sweet tooth
in novels) – all extraversion, outer reality
3: Chapter 2
• Becomes schoolmaster at Colborne College (really
Upper Canada College)
• Relationship between History (factual truth) and
Myth (psychological truth)
• Women in his life: Agnes Day (Agnus Dei),
Gloria Mundy (Gloria Mundi), Libby Doe
(Libido) – had to wait for Love’s Old Sweet Songthe reviving drop of the cauldron of Ceridwen, a
Welsh witch, patron of poetry, literature and
nature.
3: Chapter 4
• Dunny looks for Madonna wood carving in
Belgian battlefields – studies Madonna
figures – becomes interested in saints –
deepened his sense of wonder and religious
awe
3: chapter 5
• Boy becomes aide-de-camp for HRH Prince of
Wales -- Boy’s mentor but really a persona figure,
not real
• Dunny refer to HRH’s tour of Canada as “one of
those coincidences that we might be wiser to call
synchronicities…something which heaved him, in
a stroke, into a higher sphere and maintained him
there” (126)
• Boy teaches Leola society manners, etiquette –
finds her increasingly unsatisfactory as a society
wife
3 Chapter 6
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The Stauntons’ first child David is born/ Jazz Age period now over – they are Serious Young
Marrieds
Join Anglican Church which makes no demands on them but is the Church where the high WASP
society of Toronto go
Boy’s advice to Dunny: “If you don’t hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned
soon show you what you’ll get” (129)
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to issue orders to Life. I rather liked the Greek notion of allowing Chance to
take a formative hand in my affairs.”
Dunny – consciously a thinker, but unconsciously a feeler;
Boy – consciously a feeler,but unconsciously a thinker, controlling his life, bullying Leola into
submission, judgmental of Dunny
Joel Surgeoner – synchronicity- singling Dunny out as a doubting Thomas – later explains his disdain
for police-court truth over stories which “strengthen their faith”
Mary’s submission to him was “glory coming into my life”,proof of God’s grace, a “purifying
experience” – a miracle: “She is a blessed saint for what she did for me”
Joel thanks Dunny for his donation: “Do you see now how prayers are answered?” (136)-not always
that way we expect them to be
Through Mary Surgeoner is reborn
“What Surgeoner told me made it clear that any new life must include Deptford. There was to be no
release by muffling up the path.”cf.Paul and Boy who can’tdo enough to escape their past.
3: Chapter 7
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Mr.Mahaffey (magistrate) has sneaking suspicion that Dunny knows more
about the snowball incident than he’s letting on
Is Dunny right to feel guilty still? “I still had a grudge against Boy for what he
had done, but I remembered too that if I had not been so sly, Mr Dempster
would not have been hit” (137)
Sees Fr. Regan about Mary’s 3 miracles which would make her a saint –
Regan pokes holes in his arguments – warns him against romanticizing
Catholicism, flirting with “Mother Church”: “You like the romance, but you
can’t bear the yoke” (138)
Thinks Mary is a ‘fool-saint’ – someone who does good but it means nothing
because they’re fools, or mad – Prudence is one of the cardinal virtues
Is Regan a Wise Old Man archetype? Wise but limited in his wisdom; not
open to anything but strict Church dogma- this a problem for Jung who
thought Church too narrow in its view of Christ – psychological truth again:
Mary is a real saint for Dunny
Dunny ignores Father’s advice and visits Mary again
3: Chapter 8
• Bertha Shanklin’s guilt over not being more supportive of
Mary after she married Amasa
• Speculation on what happened to Paul when he ran away
with the circus: “As like as not he’s dead long since, and
better so”(141)
• Mary confused, bothered by memories of being tied up,
Paul disappearing and Amasa dying: “She always
remembers him with a blue mouth, like a rotten hole in his
face – telling God he forgave her for ruining his life.
Amasa died praying, did you know?” (141)
• Why mouth “like a rotten hole”?
• False saintliness of Amasa vs. real saintliness of Mary
3: Chapter 9
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Stockmarket crash of ’29: Boy had tipped Dunny off so he didn’t lose his investments
-searching for Wilgefortis or Uncumber: a girl forced to marry against her will, grew a
beard, fiance repulsed and crucified – this prefigures the hermaphrodite figure of
wholeness that Dunny is unconsciously seeking
In Tyrolean village meets Faustus LeGrand, or Paul Dempster reborn. Paul’s mentor
figure is Faust who made a deal with the devil to sacrifice his soul in order to gain
wondrous powers
Paul as a trickster archetype in Dunny’s life: changes language, no interest or desire to
see his mother, steals wallet- like Boy, feels no guilt or responsibility for his mother:
“I am sorry you have so little feeling for her”
“She is part of a past that cannot be recovered or changed by anything I can do now. My
father always told me it was my birth that robed her of her sanity. So as a child I had to
carry the eight of my mother’s madness as something that was my own doing. And I had
to bear the cruelty of people who thought her kind of madness wa funny—a dirty joke.
So far as I am concerned it is over and if she dies mad, who will not say that she is better
dead?”
Paul a thinker, like Dunny, but must come to terms with his unconscious feeling side.
4: Gyges and King Candaules
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Chapter 1: Boy making money in the Depression –”I feel I should do everything I can
to see that people have necessities” while drinking his excellent scotch and soda.
He doesn’t see his own hypocrisy “..declaring that they would hold the price of bread
steady. And they did so, though the loaves seemed to be a bit puffier and gassier than
they had been before” (150)
Boy confides in Dunny regarding Leola- at 32,losing some of her girlish charm/ no
longer fulfilling the role of his anima
Boy studies Dr.Coue and auto-suggestion “Every day in every way I’m getting better
and better.” There is no real improvement and it’s external rather than internal
Dunny as the Royal Eunuch: Boy showing D. nude pictures of L. Dunny reminds him
of the myth of Candaules – proud of his wife’s beauty, he showed her naked to friend
Gyges
2 endings: in one the Queen and Gyges fall in love and dethrone Candaules; in the
other, Gyges kills Candaules – Boy thinks this is impossible – foreshadowing? Will
Dunny kill boy?
Shows the power of myth in speaking psychological truth
Despite wealth and tremendous external success, Boy is not happy and doesn’t know
why
4: Chapter 2
• 1932 Bertha Shanklin dies, naming Dunstan as executor of
her estate which goes mainly to care for Mary
• Orpheus Wettenhall, Bertha’s lawyer, kills himself when he
knows the truth of his embezzlement will come out: he has
used Bertha’s money to invest and has lost his investments
–yet people defended him and thought Bertha showed
“poor taste in dying so soon and embarrassing the local
Nimrod”. (162)
• Dunny learned 2 lessons: “that popularity and good
character are not related, and that compassion dulls the
mind faster than brandy.”
• As guardian of Mary, Dunny has her placed in a public
hospital for the insane
4: chapter 3
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Writes to the Bollandist Society about the bearded lady saint and finds them
very receptive and wanting to meet a “serious hagiographer” like Dunny (166)
Dunny often invited to Boy’s dinner parties: Boy’s friends are smug,selfsatisfied, patronizing, shallow, believing they’re in control of their Destiny,
and the ordinary man is shiftless and lazy
Dunny sometimes doubts his choices in life: 34, single, childless, “dreaming
(his) life away”.
“My path was certainly an odd one for a Deptford lad, raised as a Protestant,
but fate had pushed me in this direction so firmly that to resist would be
dangerous defiance. For I was, as you have already guessed, a collaborator
with Destiny, not one who put a pistol to its head and demanded particular
treasures. The only thing for me to do was to keep on keeping on, to have
faith in my whim and remember that for me, as for the saints, illumination
when it came would probably come from some unexpected source” (169)
Blazon as Wise Old Man Archetype
• Padre Blazon: “Mankind cannot ensure perfection; it stifles
him…even saints should cast a shadow.” miracles happen
quite often – he himself was a miracle – only son in family
of 7 girls – looking to reconcile the wisdom of the body
(matter) with the wisdom of the soul spirit)
• “Find your answer in psychological truth, not objective
truth.”
• Begin by forgiving yourself for being human
• Saints are not wise but instead do spectacular things (Mrs.
Dempster)
• “What figure is she in your personal mythology?” (177)
Understanding the Subtlety
• Einstein: “God is subtle, but He is not cruel.” “Try to
understand the subtlety and stop whimpering about the
cruelty” (178)
•
I think you are a fool to fret that she was knocked on the
head because of an act of yours. Perhaps that was what
she was for,,Ramezay. She saved you on the battlefield,
you say. But did she no also save you when she took the
blow that was meant for you. ..Maybe God wants you for
something special. Maybe so much you are worth a
woman’sanity.”(178)
• Padre Blazon looking for a God who will teach him how to
grow old (176)
4: chapter 4
• If Dunny felt so bad about Mrs. Dempster’s situation, why
didn’t he got to Boy and ask for money to have her put in a
better place?
• 1) “Staunton did not like to reminded of Deptford except
as a joke.”
• 2) “Boy had a way of dominating anything with which he
was associated….He would have established himself as
Mrs. D’s patron and saviour and I would have been
demoted to his agent”
• 3)”I was determined that if I could not take care of Mrs. D,
nobody else should do it. She was mine.” (180)
Dunny and Boy at mid-life
• Completed first book: A Hundred Saints for Travellers
• Boy thinks Freud a madman to be so obsessed with sex, but sex “was
so much of the very grain of Boy’s life that he noticed itno more than
the air he breathed.”
• Dunny “much more concerned with that old fantastical duke of dark
corners, C.G. Jung”(182)
• Boy won’t let David play with a doll, provides him with “manly” toys,
indulges and spoils his “princess” Caroline, and ignores Leola
• “Explicit about his sexual needs: he had to have intercourse often, and
it had to be all sorts of things – intense, passionate, cruel, witty
challenging – and he had to have it with a Real Woman.
• “It all sound very exhausting and strangely like a sharp workout with
the punching bag.” (183)
Boy still searching for his anima
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Corporate homosexuality- Boy’s new anima is an animus – a projection of himself in a
younger form (his proteges – ultimately tires of them – prefiguring ?
The Prince of Wales abdicates the throne on 11 December 1936 “for the woman I love”
Christmas that year: Leola in tears, David in room with a book he wasn’t reading,
Caroline rampaging through the house demanding attention for a doll she had broken,
Boy moping over King’s abdication
Leola discovers the woman’s note in Boy’s pocket
Boy leaves
Leola tries to seduce Boy, attempts to kill herself, leaves suicide note implicating Dunny
as her lover, children know of attempted suicide
The aftermath when Boy returns a several days later: Leola “had joined the great
company of the walking wounded in the battle of life.” David becomes increasingly
quiet, Caroline a screamer and tantrum-thrower.
“David told me many years later that he hated Christmas more than any other day in the
calendar.” (189)
signifies a turn in the tide of Boy’s life
5: Liesl
Chapter 1
• Boy at his zenith in terms of power, influence:
involved in the war effort, feeding the armed
forces, nation & Britain
• Hardly sees family in Toronto—he’s in Ottawa
• Makes David go to Colborne College as a
boarding student from the age of 10 on
• “Although I cannot vouch for this, I have always
thought it suspicious that Leola opened her
windows one afternoon, when the nurse had
closed them, and took a chill, and was dead in less
than a week (193).
Boy is too busy to attend
• “He asked me by cable to do what had to be done,
so I arranged the funeral” (193)
• “Poor Mum, I guess she’s better off, really (193).
• “There were not a great many present, for all the
Stauntons’ friends were important people, and it
seemed that all the important people were so busy
fighting the war in one way or another that they
could not come. But there were mountains of
costly flowers, looking particularly foolish under a
November sky (193).
Milo’s mythology
• “It’s the end of a great romance. You know we
always thought her and Perse was the handsomest
pair that ever got married in Deptford. And I
know why you never got married It must be tough
on you to see her go, Dunny”
• “My shame was that it was not tough at all . What
wa tough was to go with David back to that awful,
empty house and talk to him until the servants
gave us a poor dinner….” (19)
Dunny “unsuitable” as post-war
Headmaster
• “Dunny, you’ve “done a superb job during the
whole of the war….but it was fun, wasn’t it?”
• “You don’t want to go on being Head, do you?”
• “They want a younger Headmaster.”
• “A Headmaster needs a wife.”
• “You’re queer”
• “Parents nowadays want someone more like
themselves.” ( or like Boy himself)
Dunny in Mexico
• “..the picture was…the Virgin, a peasant girl of about fifteen, stood on
a crescent moon”(198)
• My eyes were on the kneeling petitioners whose faces had the beauty
virtually every face reveals in the presence of the goddess of mercy,
the Holy Mother, the figure of divine compassion.
• “…Anticlericalism and American bustle will soon free them from
belief in miracles and holy likenesses. But where…will mercy and
divine compassion come from then? Or are such things necessary to
people who are well fed and know the wonders that lie concealed in an
atom? I don’t regret economic and educational advance: I just
wonder how much we shall have to pay for it, and in what coin” (199).
The human need to wonder
• “Why do people all over the world, and at
all times, want marvels that defy all
verifiable facts? And are the marvels
brought into being by their desire, or is their
desire an assurance rising from sone deep
knowledge, not to be directly experienced
and questioned, that the marvellous is
indeed an aspect of the real” (199)
Magnus Eisengrim
• Magnus – Large, grand; also a nuance of Magus
(the magician, trickster archetype)
• Eisengrim- grim wolf
• “…he did not present himself as a funny man but
as one who offered an entertainment of mystery
and beauty, with a hint of terror as well….A poetic
magician who took himself seriously.”
• “..so self-assured, so polished, so utterly unlike the
circus conjurer with the moustache and beard and
shabby clothes whom I had met in Le grand
cirque..more than 15 years before” (201-2)
The Vision of Dr. Faustus
• “the spice of cruelty seemed the please the audience very
much”(204)
• “the conflict was between Sacred and Profane Love for the
soul of Faust”
• “It was plain enough that Gretchen and Venus were the
same girl…conveyed the message that beauty of spirit and
lively sensuality might inhabit one body”
• ..the beautiful Faustina (appeared) once more as…the
Eternal Feminine, radiating compassion while showing a
satisfactory amount of leg”
• “Mephistopheles threw aside his robe and showed
that…this was certainly Eisengrim the Great” (204)
Liesl as Hermaphrodite
• “the person who was speaking to me…was
probably a woman but she wore man’s dress, had
short hair, and was certainly the ugliest human
creature I had ever seen….She was tall, straight,
and obviously very strong, but she had big hands
and feet, a huge, jutting jaw, and a heaviness of
bone over the eyes that seemed to confine them to
small, very deep caverns….Her voice was
beautiful and her utterance was an educated
speech of some foreign flavour” (205)
More on Liesl
• “Liesl became less ugly after an hour or two…her shirt
was soft and her beautiful scarf was drawn through a
ring…her short hair was smartly arranged…nothing could
mitigate the extreme, the deformed ugliness of her face,
but she was graceful, had a charming voice, and gave
evidence of a keen intelligence held in check so that
Eisengrim might dominate the conversation” (207)
• “A distinguished hagiographer does not often come our
way”
• “There is more than one kind of magic. This speech had
the effect of revealing to me that Liesl was not nearly so
ugly as I had thought, and was indeed a woman of
captivating intellect and charm…” (209)
Chapter 4
• “I thought that much of his extraordinarily impressive
personality arose from his ignorance – or rather from his
lack of a headful of shallow information that would have
enable him to hold his own in a commonplace way among
commonplace people”
• The Brazen Head of Friar Bacon, the great priest-magician
that knew the past and could foretell the future
• “Liesl’s job was to speak for the Brazen Head…she was a
woman of formidable intelligence and intuition”(214)
Something wrong with Dunstan
• “Two things that were wrong I could easily
identify: I had become a dangerously
indiscreet talker, and I was in love with the
beautiful Faustina”
• Liesl’s Dunny “confidante”, the financial
backer,chief mechanic and artificer of the
Brazen Head, and Paul’s closest associate.
Liesl’s advice to Dunny
• “There is really no such thing as a secret;
everybody likes to tell, and everybody does
tell…you have paid such a price and you
look like a man full of secrets- grimmouthed and buttoned-up and hard-eyed
and cruel, because you are cruel to yourself.
It has done you good to tell what you know;
you look much more human already”(217)
More advice
• “You despise almost everybody except
Paul’s mother…you have made her carry
the affection you should have spread among
fifty people...that horrid village and your
hateful Scots family made you a moral
monster….Well, it is not too late for you to
enjoy a few years of almost normal
humanity” (217)
Eisengrim’s love
• “it was clear enough to me that his compelling
love affair was with himself; his mind was always
on his public personality, and on the illusions over
which he fussed psychologically quite as much as
Liesl did mechanically. I had seen a good deal of
egotism in my life, and I knew that it starved love
for anyone else and sometimes burned it out
completely. Had it not been so with Boy and
Leola? (220)
Collapse of the Spirit
• “The door was open and I saw Faustina naked –
she was always changing her clothes – in the arms
of Liesl, who held her close and kissed her
passionately; she had her left arm around Faustina,
and her right hand was concealed from me, but the
movement of Faustina’s hips and her dreamy
murmurs made it clear, even to my unaccustomed
eyes, what their embrace was”
• “…this time there was no Little Madonna to offer
my courage or ease me into oblivion” (220
St. Dunstan and the Devil
• “She is of the earth, and her body is her shop and
her temple, and whatever her body tells her is all
of the law and the prophets.”
• “You talk as if you though you were God.”
• “That is your privilege, you pseudo-cynical old
pussy cat, watching life from the sidelines and
knowing where all the players go wrong. Life is a
spectator sport to you. Now you have take a
tumble, and found yourself in the middle of the
fight, and you are whimpering because it is
rough”(222)
The Mystical Marriage
• “…she caught up my wooden leg and hit me such a crack
over my single shin that I roared and cursed.”
Significance?
• As she turned (the door) I got a hold on the bedhead with
one hand, and seized her nose between the fingers of the
other, and gave it such a twist that I thought I heard
something crack. She shrieked, managed to tug the door
open, and thundered down the passage” (224)
• The elderly Spanish gentleman and his protestations about
the noisy lovemaking and subsequent apology
Revenge of the unlived life
• “You are a decent chap to everybody, except one special
somebody, and that is Dunstan Ramsay. How can you be
really good to anybody if you are not good to yourself?”
• “There is a whole great piece of your life that is unlived,
denied, set aside. That is why at 50 you can’t bear it any
longer and fly all to pieces and pour out your heart to the
first really intelligent woman you have me – me,--and get
into a schoolboy yearning for a girl who is a far from you
as if she lived on the moon. This is the revenge of the
unlived life, Ramsay. Suddenly it makes a fool of you”
(226)
Dunny’s personal devil
• “Oh, this Christianity! Even when people swear they don’t
believe in it, the 1500 years of Christianity that has made
our world is in their bones, and they want to show they can
be Christians without Christ. Those are the worst: they
have the cruelty of doctrine without the poetic grace of
myth….Why don’t you…do something inexplicable,
irrational, at the devil’s biding and just for the hell of it?
…What I am saying is not for everybody..only for the
twice-born. One always knows the twice-born. They often
go so far as to take new names?...Do you know what my
name really means, Liselotte Vitzliputzli? (226-7)
“I think you are
th
5
Business”
“You must have a prima donna- always a
soprano, always the heroine, often a fool;
and a tenor who always plays the lover to
her; and then you must have a contralto,
who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress
or something; and a basso, who is the villain
or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.”
Fifth Business defined
• “But you cannot make a plot work with another
man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called
in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the
odd man out, the person who has no opposite of
the other sex. And you must have fifth business
because he is the one who knows the secret of the
hero’s birth, or comes to the assistance of the
heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keep the
hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of
somebody’s death if that is part of the plot.
The vital though never glorious role
• “The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and
the basso, get all the best music and do all the
spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot
without
Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a
good line of work I can tell you, and those who
play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the
golden voices. Are you fifth Business? You had
better find out” (227)
Embracing one’s devil
• “We talked until a clock somewhere struck
four and then fell happily asleep but not
without having achieved the purpose for
which Liesl had first of all invaded my
room.”
• “And with such a gargoyle! And yet never
have I known such deep delight or such an
aftermath of healing tenderness!” (227)
6: The Soiree of Illusions
• Magnus takes responsibility for partially maintaining his
mother: “He did not want to do it, swore that he owed her
nothing and had indeed been driven from home by her bad
reputation. I pointed out to him, however, that if this had
not been the case, he would not have become the Great
Eisengim but would probably be a Baptist parson in rural
Canada” (230)
• “I seem to have turned Mrs. Dempster from a woman who
was simple and nothing worse, into a woman who knew
there wa a plot to deprive her of her little son, and that I
was its agent” (233)
6: chapter 2
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
“Thus I lost, for a time, one of the fixed stars in my universe”(233).
Another loss: Boy married again, and Denyse did not like Dunny
Boy’s political life: MP as a result of a by-election “The Conservative Party found him
an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public” (235)
“It was here that Denyse’s masculinity of mind showed itself with the greatest clarity”
(236)
“I can’t help you there. (getting the wife needed for the L-G’s office). You’re on your
own so far as that goes.”
Denyse plays coy: could a rep of the Crown have a wife who was a divorcee?
“There had been other men”
“People might imagine that she married him for his money or the position he could give
her.”
“…thought of him...as a Canadian Coriolanus, (giving) it to those sons of bitches who
had turned on him at the last election…a really great man too proud to shake hands and
kiss babies to persuade a lot of riffraff to let hm do what he was obviously born to
do”(238)
The happy family
•
•
•
•
Comic characterization of Lorene
David the drunk
Caroline as unpleasant as ever
Denyse “had a fair measure of intuition and sense that I
regarded woman as something other than fellow citizens
who had been given an economic raw deal because of a
few unimportant biological differences” (24)
• “She was a woman whose life and interest were entirely
external: It was not that she was indifferent to the things
of the spirit: she sensed their existence and declared
herself their enemy”. (240)
The tide turns for Boy
• Boy “denounced me petulantly for what he called
my triviality of mind and my encouragement of
superstition…he had not read the book…he could
not stand such stuff because he was an atheist”
(241).
• “I’m not surprised. You created a God in your
own image, and when you found out he was no
good you abolished him….a quite common form
of psychological suicide” (241).
Whom the gods hate they keep
forever young
• “I feel rotten. I’ve done just about everything I’ve
ever planned to do, and everybody thinks I’m a
success. And of course I have Denyse now to
keep me upto the mark, which is lucky… But
sometimes, I wish I could get into a car and drive
away from the whole damned thing” (242)
• “You must grow old, Boy; you’ll have to find out
what age means, and how to be old” (242).
• “That’s the most lunatic defeatist nonsense I’ve
ever heard”
The revenge of the repressed
• “I have never thought that traits strong in
childhood disappear; they may go underground or
they may be transmuted into something else, but
they donot vanish; very often they make a
vigorous appearance after the meridian of life has
been passed. My boyhood trick of getting off good
ones that went far beyond any necessary selfdefence and were likely to wound had come back
to me in my fifties. I was going to be a sharptongued old man as I had been a sharp-tongued
boy”(242)
The persona wears thin
• “Boy Staunton had reached a point in life
where he no longer tried to conceal his
naked wish to dominate everybody and was
angry and ugly when things went against
him.
• “As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had
wrapped about our essential selves were
wearing thin” (242).
6: chapter 4
• I kept up a kind of dismal stoicism unil I went to bed, and
then I wept. I had not done such a thing since my mother
had beaten me so many years before– no, not even in the
worst of the war – and it frightened and hurt me. When at
last I fell asleep I dreamed frightening dreams, in some of
which my mother figured in terrible forms” (244)
• “Saints....give off a sweet odour when they are dead; in
many instances it has been likened to the scent of violets
So I bent over the head of Mary Dempster and sniffed for
this true odour of sanctity” (245)
Padre Blazon revisited
• “She thinks I am an ogre disguised as an old Jesuit.”
• “I have been thinking about your fool-saint: she must have
been an extraordinary person, a great lover of God, and
trusting greatly in His love for her…it seems far more
important…that her life was lived heroically; she endured
a hard fate, did the best she could, and kept it up until at
last her madness was too powerful for her. Heroism ijn
God’s cause is the mark of the saint, Ramezay, not
conjuring tricks…your life has been illuminated by your
fool-saint, and how many can say so much?
Have you met the Devil yet?
• “I met Him in Mexico City. He was disguised as a
woman- an extremely ugly woman but unquestionably a
woman.”
• “He even suggested that an acquaintance with Him might
improve my character.”
• “The Devil knows corner of us all of which Christ Himself
is ignorant. I am sure Christ learned a great deal that was
salutary about Himself when he met the Devil in the
wilderness. Of course, that was a meeting of brothers.”
(249)
• “You met the Devil as an equal not cringing or frightened
or begging for a trashy favour. You are fit to be the Devil’s
friend, without any fear of losing yourself to Him!”
I have not yet found a God to teach
me how to grow old; have you?
• “Yes, I have found Him, and He is the very best of
company: we do, but He is.
• “For here Salzburg) at last, after having abandoned hope
and forgotten my search, I found the Little Madonna I had
seen….at Passchendaele….her foot set on the crescent
moon. Benath this moon was what I had not seen in he
flare..the globe of the earth itself, a serpent encircling it, an
apple in the mouth of the serpent He had lost her sceptre,
ut not the Divine Child..not the face of Mary Dempster
“but the expression was undeniably hers- an expression of
mercy and love, tempered with perception and
penetration.”
• “I needed no picture. She was mine forever.” (251)
Boy dies
• “At about 4 o’clock on the morning of November 4, 1968,
his Cadillac convertible was recovered from the waters of
Toronto harbour, into which it had been driven at a speed
great enough to carry it, as it sank, about 20 feet from the
concrete pier. His body was in the driver’s seat, the hands
gripping the wheel so tightly that it was very difficult for
the police to remove him from the car. But the most
curious fact of all was that in Boy’s mouth the police found
a stone – an ordinary piece of pinkish granite about the size
of a small egg- which could not possibly have been where
it was unless he himself, or someone unknown had put it
there.”
The variability of truth
• Eisengrim’s visit to the school: “He emphasized the fact
that nobody can be made to do anything under hypnotism
that is contrary to his wishes, though of course people have
wishes that they are unwilling to acknowledge, even to
themselves” (255)
• Boy meets Magnus: “I was conscious already that Boy was
up to one of his special displays of charm….he had put his
foot wrong with Eisengrim by asking him the real secret of
an illusion. ..Eisengrim had been sharp enough with his to
arouse hostility, and Boy loved to defeat hostility by
turning the other cheek. Eisengrim further topped him by
the little bit of observation about the letter.
Boy Meets his Shadow
• “It was clear to me that one of those sympathies,
or antipathies, or at any rate unusual states of
feeling had arisen between these two which
sometimes leads to falling in love, to sudden warm
friendships, or to lasting and rancorous
enmities…which are always extraordinary.”
• “It was like Boy to seek to ingratiate himself with
the new friend by treating the old friend with
genial contempt.”(257)
Puer Eternus vs. Grim Wolf
• “I was amazed that Paul would tell him such a
thing (that Dunny wrote his Autobiography)…he,
like Boy, was prepared to play some high cards in
this game of topping each other.”
• “I remember you very well. I always thought of
you as the Rich Young Ruler.”
• “He (Dunny) was my only teacher till I ran away
with the circus.”
• “You know I wanted to do that. I suppose it is part
of every boy’s dream” (25()
Magnus’s Faustian contract
• “Then boys are lucky it remains a dream”
• Magnus recounts his experiences with Willard the
Wizard who had a weakness for boys and
morphine
• “I was chained to Willard by fear; I was his thing
and his creature, and I learned conjuring as a
reward. One always learns one’s mystery at the
price of one’s innocence, though my case was
spectacular.”
• Willard declined from conjurer to Wild Man
(geek) and Le Solitaire des forets.
Guilt vs. Shame
• “I was too young for the kind of guilt my
father wanted me to feel; he had an
extraordinary belief in guilt as an educative
force. I couldn’t stand it. I cannot feel guilt
now. But I can call up in an instant what it
felt like to be the child of a woman
everybody jeered at the thought a dirty
joke– including you, the Rich Young Ruler”
Psychological truth
• “..I had to accept it as a fact that he had so
far edited his memory of his early days that
the incident of the snowball had quite
vanished from his mind. But had not Paul
edited his memories so that only pain and
cruelty remained? I began to wonder what I
had erased from my own recollection” (261)
Significance of their new names
• “You have always wanted to be loved;
nobody responds quite as we would wish,
and people are suspicious of a public figure
who wants to be loved. I have been wiser
than you. I chose a Wolf’s name. You have
chosen forever to be a Boy. Was it because
your mother used to call you Pidgy BoyBoy, even when you were old enough to call
my mother “hoor”? (262)
All three company of the twice-born
• “Hard people..especially your mother.”
• “Wrong.” and I told him how my mother
had worked and schemed and devised a nest
to keep him alive, and exulted when he
decided to live.”
• “Now it was his turn to be disconcerted.”
(262)
The “cigar humidor”
• “Why would you keep a thing like that with you?
• “A form of guilt unexpiated.”
• “Guilt?” said Eisengrim.
Here it was. Either I spoke now or I kept silence
forever. Dunstan Ramsay counselled against
revelation, but Fifth Business would not hear.
“Yes, guilt. Staunton and I robbed your mother of
her sanity.” And I told them the story of the
snowball.
The aftermath
• Too bad, but if I may say so, I think you’ve
let the thing built up into something it never
was. I threw the snowball…and you
dodged it..It precipitated something which
was probably going to happen anyhow. The
difference between us is that you’ve
brooded over it and I’ve forgotten it. We’ve
both done far more important things
since…you know what boys are.” (23)
The stone as self archetype
• “It is the stone you put in the snowball you threw at Mrs.
Dempster. I’ve kept it because I couldn’t part with it. Boy,
for God’s sake, get to know something about yourself. The
stone-in-the-snowball has been characteristic of too much
you’ve done to forget it forever.” (264)
• “I’m simply trying to recover something of the totality of
your life-don’t you want to possess it as a whole- the bad
with th good? I told you once you’d made a God of
yourself, and the insufficiency of it forced you to become
an atheist. It’s time you tried to be a human being.” (264)
The missing paperweight
• “You’re trying to get me. You want to humiliate
me in front of this man her; you seem to have been
in cahoots with him for years, though you never
mentioned him or his miserable mother to me –
your best friend, and your patron and protector
against your own incompetence!” (264)
• “Let me give you a lift”. Of course; he wanted to
blackguard me to Eisengrim in the car.
• “Do you want to take this with you, Paul?”
• “No thanks, Ramsay. I have everything I need.
6:Chapter 8
• “Who killed Boy Staunton?”
• “He was killed by the usual cabal: by himself,
first of all; by the woman he knew; by the woman
he did not know; by the man who granted his
inmost wish; and by the inevitable fifth, who was
keeper of his conscience and keeper of the stone.”
• “Of course, Denyse thought ‘the woman he knew’
must be herself.’
Who are the usual cabal?
• “I knew nothing about it, because it was there, in
that box, that I had my seizure and was rushed to
the hospital, as I was afterward told, by a foreign
lady”.
• “Deeply sorry about your illness which was my
fault as much as most such things are anybody’s
fault. But I could not resist my temptation as I beg
you not to resist this one: one to Switzerland and
join the Basso and the Brazen Head. We shall
have some high old times before The Five make
an end of us all.” Love, L.V.
More Jungian Theory
• “In the individuation process, something
obsolete must be left behind to die in order
that the new man may be born.” C.G.Jung
• “The individuation process is part of the
mystery of transformation pervading all
creation. It includes the secret of life which
is ceaselessly reborn in passing through an
ever-renewed “death.”
Four Births
• 1st: bodily man steps into life from mother’s
womb
• 2nd: at puberty, ego frees itself from its fusion
with parental authority, acquires a defined form,
independence and responsibility
• 3rd: when spiritual body emerges from conflicts of
middle life and anchored again in depths of
psyche, allies himself with Self (rebirth)
• 4th: Man departs through the door of life ad reenters vast, unexplored land beyond death, from
where he came
“It is not in the goal but in the
striving towards this goal that gives
life content, meaning.”
• If man is to live, he must fight and sacrifice
his longing for the past in order to rise to his
own heights. Having reached the noonday
heights, he must sacrifice his love for his
own achievement, for he may not loiter.
The sun, too, sacrifices its greatest strength
in order to hasten onward to the fruits of
autumn, which are the seeds of rebirth.
“If the sacrifice is made willingly,
transformation & rebirth ensues.”
• Understanding inner and outer reality is key to meaning. To surrender
oneself to both realms is essential to full individuation.
• Running away from the past to new (Boy) or protecting oneself from
what is new (Dunny) and strange are both stages of neurosis. One
separates himself from the past; the other, the future. They need to
shatter their narrow range of consciousness in the tension of opposites
and build to a wider, higher consciousness.
• No risk or suffering should be shunned
• One must face everything that comes and hold out against fate (let
things happen)
• The ability ot live open-eyed with one’s darkness demands courage
and forbearance -- that is the heroic life.