Vladimir Nabokov

PALE FIRE allusion to Salinger's Franny and Zooey

By MARYROSS, 29 November, 2021

     Nabokov’s Pale Fire is replete with allusions to literary greats (and some not-so-greats), as is well known. One allusion that I believe has not been mentioned suggests J. D. Salinger. Salinger was actually one of the few of his contemporaries that Nabokov approved of. They each had a story in The New Yorker’s anthology of the 55 best short stories published from 1940-1950. It was discovered after Nabokov’s death that in his personal copy he had graded each of the 55 stories– mostly low and with only two A+’s: his own Colette and Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.  (http://thenabokovian.org/node/9766)

 

     The allusion in Pale Fire I wish to discuss is a key metaphor from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey – the cluelessly proffered tangerine. I believe this deceptively simple image is a key to understanding Pale Fire as well. We find it in Shade’s poem, line 371:

 

And I would hear both voices now and then:

‘Mother, what’s grimpen?’ What is what?

                                                               ‘Grim Pen.’

Pause, and your guarded scholium. Then again:

‘Mother, what’s chtonic?’ That, too, you’d explain,

Appending: ‘Would you like a tangerine?’

‘No. Yes. And what does sempiternal mean?’ (Lines 368-372)

 

    The first time I read this passage I confess I thought “tangerine” was a rather weak reaching for a rhyme. I also assumed it was meant to demonstrate the cozy triptych of the Shade family. I now believe it was so intended – but deceptively. I began to see that all was not as it should be chez Shades, and there is a significant subtlety within the proffered tangerine. Hazel’s parents’ concern for their spiritually sensitive daughter is misplaced; they care about her looks and social life, whereas her internal life remains unacknowledged, glossed over, or deflected. They are sympathetic but not empathetic. Sybil’s proffering of a tangerine feels like a deflection from having to explain spiritual terminology for which she has only “guarded scholium”– perhaps even a distaste (for mysticism as well as T.S. Eliot)? Hazel’s “No. Yes.” feels like an irritated dismissal at her mother’s gratuitous disruption.  Sibyl’s typical concern for her daughter is to offer banal bromidic advice such as “less starch, more fruit.” Hazel, on the other hand, criticizes her parents “ferociously” and sees Sybil as a “didactic katydid” – that is, chirpy and preachy. (The epithet actually demonstrates Hazel’s special genius at “word twisting.”) This all may seem a small point, but it is amplified immensely by the tangerine allusion to Salinger’s dysfunctional Glass family.

 

     Twenty-year-old Franny Glass is having a “nervous breakdown” (really a spiritual crisis) and is being cared for by her didactic katydid of an obtrusive and clueless mother, who keeps pushing chicken soup at her and criticizing her diet. Spiritually and psychologically Mrs. Glass is blind and tone-deaf. Lacking in any real empathy but packed with over-abundant officious concern, she latches on to her one purview of authority and control – the nurturing mother. Mrs. Glass barges in on her twenty-five-year-old son, Zooey, while he is taking a bath (!) to complain, ironically, about Mr. Glass being clueless in proffering Franny a tangerine:

 

   “He has absolutely no conception of anything being really wrong with Franny. But none! Right after the eleven-o’clock news last night, what do you think he asks me? If I think Franny might like a tangerine! The child’s laying there by the hour crying her eyes out if you say boo to her, and mumbling heaven knows what to herself, and your father wonders if maybe she’d like a tangerine. I could’ve killed him. The next time he –” Mrs. Glass broke off. She glared at the shower curtain. “What’s so funny?” she demanded.

   “Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I like the tangerine. All right, who else is being no help to you? [...]” (p.83)

 

     Zooey is amused because his solipsistic mother actually makes an accurate observation about his clueless father, but she does not see that he has taken his cue from her! Mr. Glass’ usual style is avoidant denial and going along with whatever Mrs. Glass says. It is clear that he humbly proffers the tangerine according to her dietary diagnosis. It is also clear that these unattuned parents are the source of Franny’s breakdown and spiritual crisis.  In Pale Fire, Kinbote’s mis en abime play in the barn, with the inane mother, the passive father and the disaffected daughter is markedly like the double-bind etiology of Franny’s crisis. Hazel likewise is on a spiritual search as her occult and her poetic interests attest. I should note here another similarity: Franny’s “mumbling” is an Orthodox Christian mantra from a 19th Century Russian guide to spiritual union with Christ, “The Way of a Pilgrim.” Compare this to Hazel’s “Murmuring dreadful words in monotone.” (Line 356) Hazel may have merely been chanting mantras as part of her spiritual search, to the perplexity of her parents.

 

After his mother’s diatribe on diet, Zooey sarcastically retorts:

 

          “You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. It’s staggering how you jump straight the hell into the heart of a matter. I’m goosebumps all over…By God, you inspire me. You inflame me, Bessie. You know what you’ve done? Do you realize what you’ve done? You’ve given this whole goddam issue a fresh new, Biblical slant. I wrote four papers in college on the Crucifixion – five, really – and every one of them worried me half crazy because I thought something was missing. Now I know what it was. Now it’s clear to me. I see Christ in an entirely different light. His unhealthy fanaticism. His rudeness to those nice, sane, conservative, tax-paying Pharisees. Oh, this is exciting! In your simple, straightforward, bigoted was, Bessie, you’ve sounded the missing keynote of the whole New Testament. Improper diet. Christ lived on cheeseburgers and Cokes. For all we know, he probably fed the mult– ”

          […] “It just so happens, young man that I don’t consider your little sister in exactly the same light that I do the Lord […] I don’t happen to see any comparison whatsoever between the Lord and a run-down, overwrought little college girl that’s been reading too many religious books and all that!” (p.85)

 

            The proffered tangerine is Salinger’s “keynote” metaphor at the “heart of the matter.” It describes the parental disconnect as well as the spiritual crisis theme. The irony is that whereas Mrs. Glass sees no connection between her daughter and Christ, eventually Franny sees Christ in her mother. Franny and Zooey, like Pale Fire, is, among other things, primarily a novel about spiritual seeking. Franny and Zooey is more overtly, and resolvingly Christian.

 

    “All right, Franny. C’mon now. You said you’d hear me out. I’ve said the worst, I think. I’m just trying to tell you – I’m not trying, I’m telling you – that this is not fair to Bess and Les [Mrs. And Mr. Glass]. It’s terrible for them – and you know it. Did you know, God damn it, that Les was all for bringing a tangerine in to you last night before he went to bed? My God. Even Bessie can’t stand stories with tangerines in them. And God knows I can’t. If you’re going to go on with this breakdown business, I wish to hell you’d go back to college to have it. Where you’re not the baby of the family. And where, God knows, nobody’ll have any urges to bring you any tangerines…” (p.159)

 

Yet later Zooey says:

 

     “I’ll tell you one thing, Franny. One thing I know. And don’t get upset. It isn’t anything bad. But if it’s the religious life you want, you ought to know right now that you’re missing out of every single goddam religious action that’s going on around this house. You don’t even have sense enough to drink when somebody brings you a cup of consecrated chicken soup – which is the only kind of chicken soup Bessie ever brings to anybody around this mad house…” (p. 161)

 

     The story really should have ended here, but loses all ironic subtlety and persists to a didactic resolution; Zooey leads Franny to an epiphany about the necessity of being oneself with impeccability and seeing Christ within everyone, including their ridiculous mother. In other words, she realizes the real message of the pilgrim’s mantra (“Lord Jesus have pity on me, a sinner.”)

 

     Nabokov, who disdained didacticism or pat resolutions perhaps felt similarly and thus intentionally subverted this image. The proffered tangerine in Pale Fire seems a clear allusion to Salinger’s key symbol of parental disconnect, but it is not exact. Most glaringly, Franny is beautiful and popular, her boyfriend is a catch, and at least her brother understands her and helps her to a transcendent epiphany. Whereas in Pale Fire’s mirror, Hazel is homely and rejected, can’t get a date, no one understands her, and thus suicides. There is no discernable resolution at Pale Fire’s end. It’s a case of failed transcendence. Every main character dies, except Sybil. This suggests the paramount archetypal position of Sybil, which I won’t get into here. 

 

     I believe, as Brian Boyd has demonstrated, that Nabokov is purposely ambiguous so that the reader has to provide their own solution based on clues at the antithetic level, such as his conclusion that as a transmigrated butterfly, Hazel does ultimately transcend. She becomes beautiful, forgiving and of service, not unlike the beatific epiphany that Salinger leaves Franny with at the conclusion of Franny and Zooey. So this interpretation works.

 

     However, Nabokov’s ambiguity allows for other interpretations. My interpretation, also based on antithetic clues, such as this one from Salinger, (but largely on the antithetic evidence of Jungian archetypes that the point of Pale Fire is a tricky game of dual solutions and subversion of pat conclusions. In the mirror, the tables are turned. For instance, if Pale Fire on the antithetic level exhibits all the traits of a Jungian “Hero’s Journey” but fails to deal with the major conflict, the anima (Sybil), then the journey is unsuccessful, a failed transcendence. Likewise, Nabokov’s borrowing of Salinger’s transcendent symbol is subverted with Hazel’s homeliness and hopelessness. As Kinbote’s play concludes:

 

Life is hopeless, afterlife heartless. Hazel is heard quietly weeping in the dark. John Shade lights a lantern. Sybil lights a cigarette. Meeting adjourned.

Alexey Sklyarenko

2 years 3 months ago

In J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye Phoebe Caulfield (Holden's younger sister, aged ten) writes stories about a girl detective, an orphan named Hazel Weatherfield. Phoebe Caulfield is a coeval of Betty (Judge Goldsworth's third daughter):

 

Judge Goldsworth had a wife, and four daughters. Family photographs met me in the hallway and pursued me from room to room, and although I am sure that Alphina (9), Betty (10), Candida (12), and Dee (14) will soon change from horribly cute little schoolgirls to smart young ladies and superior mothers, I must confess that their pert pictures irritated me to such an extent that finally I gathered them one by one and dumped them all in a closet under the gallows row of their cellophane-shrouded winter clothes. In the study I found a large picture of their parents, with sexes reversed, Mrs. G. resembling Malenkov, and Mr. G. a Medusa-locked hag, and this I replaced by the reproduction of a beloved early Picasso: earth boy leading raincloud horse. I did not bother, though, to do much about the family books which were also all over the house - four sets of different Children's Encyclopedias, and a stolid grown-up one that ascended all the way from shelf to shelf along a flight of stairs to burst an appendix in the attic. Judging by the novels in Mrs. Goldsworth's boudoir, her intellectual interests were fully developed, going as they did from Amber to Zen. The head of this alphabetic family had a library too, but this consisted mainly of legal works and a lot of conspicuously lettered ledgers. All the layman could glean for instruction and entertainment was a morocco-bound album in which the judge had lovingly pasted the life histories and pictures of people he had sent to prison or condemned to death: unforgettable faces of imbecile hoodlums, last smokes and last grins, a strangler's quite ordinary-looking hands, a self-made widow, the close-set merciless eyes of a homicidal maniac (somewhat resembling, I admit, the late Jacques d'Argus), a bright little parricide aged seven ("Now, sonny, we want you to tell us -"), and a sad pudgy old pederast who had blown up his blackmailer. (note to Lines 47-48)

 

Kinbote tells Shade "people who live in glass houses should not write poems:"

 

Today it would be impossible for me to describe Shade's house in terms of architecture or indeed in any terms other than those of peeps and glimpses, and window-framed opportunities. As previously mentioned (see Foreword), the coming of summer presented a problem in optics: the encroaching foliage did not always see eye to eye with me: it confused a green monocle with an opaque occludent, and the idea of protection with that of obstruction. Meanwhile (on July 3 according to my agenda) I had learned - not from John but from Sybil - that my friend had started to work on a long poem. After not having seen him for a couple of days, I happened to be bringing him some third-class mail from his box on the road, adjacent to Goldsworth's (which I used to ignore, crammed as it was with leaflets, local advertisements, commercial catalogues, and that kind of trash) and ran into Sybil whom a shrub had screened from my falcon eye. Straw-hatted and garden-gloved, she was squatting on her hams in front of a flower bed and pruning or tying up something, and her close-fitting brown trousers reminded me of the mandolin tights (as I jokingly called them) that my own wife used to wear. She said not to bother him with those ads and added the information about his having "begun a really big poem." I felt the blood rush to my face and mumbled something about his not having shown any of it to me yet, and she straightened herself, and swept the black and gray hair off her forehead, and stared at me, and said: "What do you mean -shown any of it? He never shows anything unfinished. Never, never. He will not even discuss it with you until it is quite, quite finished." I could not believe it, but soon discovered on talking to my strangely reticent friend that he had been well coached by his lady. When I endeavored to draw him out by means of good-natured sallies such as: "People who live in glass houses should not write poems," he would only yawn and shake his head, and retort that "foreigners ought to keep away from old saws." Nevertheless the urge to find out what he was doing with all the live, glamorous, palpitating, shimmering material I had lavished upon him, the itching desire to see him at work (even if the fruit of his work was denied me), proved to be utterly agonizing and uncontrollable and led me to indulge in an orgy of spying which no considerations of pride could stop. (ibid.)

 

Your finds, Mary, are magnificent, but, unfortunately, they are spoiled by your 'Jungian' theory.

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

Alexey, I am not clear on what your intention was vis:

Kinbote tells Shade "people who live in glass houses should not write poems:"

However, that paragraph gives me the opportunity to comment that:

[Sybil's}brown trousers reminded me of the mandolin tights (as I jokingly called them) that my own wife used to wear. 

is a good illustration of how I see the Jungian paradigm works to understand the relationships of PF's characters –i.e. all are archetypes in Botkin's mind.  Sybil and Disa are the same person, the anima maid and matron.

Alexey Sklyarenko

2 years 3 months ago

In reply to by MARYROSS

Sybil's mandolin tights bring to mind mandarin (tangerine in Russian).

 

Glass houses (people who live in glass houses) may hint at the Glass family in Salinger. In one of Salinger's stories Seymour (if I'm not mistaken, he commits suicide at the end of "A Perfect Day for Bananafish") throws a stone at Charlotte. People who live in glass houses should not throw stones. One is also reminded of "a poor lame boy trying to get his spastic brother out of the range of the stones hurled at them by schoolchildren" in Kinbote's note to Line 1000.

 

I like the question mark in your heading subject!

 

Archetypes meant little to VN and they mean little to me.

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

Also, your quote re: Goldworth's album: This is an early clue to the "detective mystery" aspect of the thetic plotline. The observant reader will notice that the "homicidal maniac" is not Gradus, but "Jack Grey."  If you were to follow my Jungian reasoning, you might notice that we are also forewarned that Sybil, as the antagonistic anima is hinted at by "self-made widow."  My contention is that, on the antithetic level (where we discover the thematic allusions, such as the archetypes, chess, etc.) that the antagonistic anima is the final and most important archetype to subsume and integrate. Kinbote, as ego, although he follows a classic Jungian "Hero's Journey" never effectively deals with Sybil and therefore never "individuates" and Sybil remains the triumphant Black Queen. Thus the antithetic level illustrates the "real" detective mystery on the plot level and thus on the synthetic level returns to the thetic (theme of eternal return): Kinbote and Sybil collude to murder Shade –  He gets the treasured manuscript and she gets revenge for her husband's philandering with co-eds. She flees the country and he is left holding the bag. Kinbote then visits Jack Grey and convinces him to do the deed, convincing him to murder Shade who he thinks is Goldsworth. This is Nabokov's grand deception.

 

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

The "pudgy old pederast" probably, as a sly self-reference, indicates Botkin.

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

Oh, yes, of course! the Shade house is like the "Glass" household! Very good! Not so sure about "mandolin"/"mandarin," but could be.

I might as well add, since you mentioned it, Alexey, Sybil’s “buchmann” suggests the earlier red-capped “steinmann” discovered on Kinbote’s escape over the mountains. Kinbote, however, does not see her as an ally, in fact as his antagonist. However this suggests that they may be on the same side. I believe that in the chess game they are both “red” (Sybil’s ruby ring, Red Queen association).  Nabokov writes of a chess problem where one player sets up a "sui-mate" for the opponent to win; this may be also where he tries to restrict the "power of the queen," by having Sybil leave the country, (and/or Disa banished to her villa) which ends up with Kinbote suiciding. 

The buchmann and steinman are hermes, or cairns, piled rocks to mark a "path" (of Jungian "individuation") or "trail" (for a detective).

 

Perhaps you can tell me why (other than his detestation of Freud and psychiatry) Nabakov would not borrow ideas from Jung, when PF is all about literary appropriation? about insanity? about the occult and alchemy? about transcendence and the afterlife? (Jung had a near death experience and as a child had "swoons" that kept him home from school)

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

On the day of Shade's murder, Kinbote roars home as Sybil speeds off to her “club” (avoiding the soon-to-be crime scene?  Her club is ostensibly a book club, but I believe there may be some suggestions of a coven.  (see C 267 for a “brocken of wives”.)  With a slight transposition of letters, a “sibyl” is a medium, i.e. a witch.

Only Lewis Carroll has a Red Queen (in "Alice in the Looking Glass"). In classic chess and in Nabokov (not "Nabakov") the Queen is either black or white (Sybil Shade seems to be the black, and Queen Disa, the white queen; paradoxically, they are one and the same person whose "real" name is Sofia Botkin, born Lastochkin; in Griboedov's play in verse "Woe from Wit" Famusov's daughter Sofia Pavlovna is ferz', chess queen; K lastochke, "To a Swallow," is a poem by Griboedov).

 

Jung is not obligatory in Pale Fire (one can solve the novel's riddle without even mentioning him). On the other hand, Jung alone will not help you to find out the "real" names of the novel's main characters (including Sybil, Queen Disa and Hazel Shade), the total number of lines in Shade's poem, or where Botkin (Shade's, Kinbote's and Gradus' "real" name) is writing the Commentary to his poem.  

 

Champ being French for "field," Monsieur Beauchamp and Mr Campbell (the King's tutors) bring to mind Holden Caulfield and Hazel Weatherfield (a girl detective in Phoebe Caulfield's stories) in The Catcher in the Rye. One also recalls eight-year-old Pavlusha Vyazemski (a son of Pushkin's friends Peter and Vera Vyazemski) who criticized Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by quoting Onegin's words to Lenski in Chapter Three (IV: 10) of EO: Kakie glupye mesta! ("What silly places!").

 

The Umruds (an Eskimo tribe) remind one Salinger's story Just before the War with the Eskimos.

Alexey Sklyarenko

2 years 3 months ago

The characters in A Perfect Day for Bananafish include Sybil Carpenter, a girl who is able to see the bananafish that Seymour Glass describes.

 

In his last conversation with Shade Kinbote mentions a bunch of bananas:

 

"Well," I said, "has the muse been kind to you?"

"Very kind," he replied, slightly bowing his hand-propped head. "exceptionally kind and gentle. In fact, I have here [indicating a huge pregnant envelope near him on the oilcloth] practically the entire product. A few trifles to settle and [suddenly striking the table with his fist] I've swung it, by God."

The envelope, unfastened at one end, bulged with stacked cards.

"Where is the missus?" I asked (mouth dry).

"Help me, Charlie, to get out of here," he pleaded. "Foot gone to sleep. Sybil is at a dinner-meeting of her club."

"A suggestion," I said, quivering. "I have at my place half a gallon of Tokay. I'm ready to share my favorite wine with my favorite poet. We shall have for dinner a knackle of walnuts, a couple of large tomatoes, and a bunch of bananas. And if you agree to show me your 'finished product,' there will be another treat: I promise to divulge to you why I gave you, or rather who gave you, your theme."

"What theme?" said Shade absently, as he leaned on my arm and gradually recovered the use of his numb limb.

"Our blue inenubilable Zembla, and the red-capped Steinmann, and the motorboat in the sea cave, and -"

"Ah," said Shade, "I think I guessed your secret quite some time ago. But all the same I shall sample your wine with pleasure. Okay, I can manage by myself now." (note to Line 991)

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

I think it is important to have a rationale for allusions beyond just a coincidental name. So I can't really see how Sybil, Hazel, Eskimos, or bananas in Salinger's work connects with PF.

 

As for Beauchamp and Campbell, note that "Sally Beauchamp" was a famous early case of dissociated identity. Jung made his mark as a psychiatrist by studying multiple personalities, which led to his archetypes. Joseph Campbell who used Jung's "individuation" path, "Hero's Journey," is most likely implicated here, as the chess game between Beauchamp & Campbell initiates King Charles' journey into the tunnel (subconscious). It would be typical of Nabokov to spoonerize their names in such a way that there is a connection beyond just the names, i.e. Jungian psychology.

 

I find it interesting, Alexey, that you also believe Kinbote, Shade and Gradus are Botkin, and Sybil and Disa are the same person, which means that the story is of a psychological  breakdown of the type that Jung was a foremost exponent of. You may be right that one could figure this out without Jung (you did), but I prefer to think that Nabokov did this consciously, as part of the theft/appropriation/pale fire theme. If not then you would have to assume that if Nabokov wasn't consciously using the archetypes, then the archetypes must have been using him.

 

Why would he not use Jung, since he parodies so many luminaries, including Freud, Pfisker, and Fromm? He didn't have to like him, although I suspect he did, cautiously. Jung was the pre-eminent psychologist at the time PF was written. He was also Switzerland's most famous resident at the time VN was writing both PF and Onegin. Onegin was published by Jung's prestigious publisher, the Bollingen Foundation, which was created to publish Jung's collected works (they also published Joseph Cambell's works, Chapman's Homer, Dante's trilogy, collections of Valerey, Colleridge, Plato, & Aristotle. I would imagine Nabokov was grateful. He has never said anything negative about Jung.  Jung was a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR – the model for PF's IPH), along with 16 other people alluded to in PF. There is much, much more.

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

I think it is important to have a rationale for allusions beyond just a coincidental name. So I can't really see how Sybil, Hazel, Eskimos, or bananas in Salinger's work connects with PF.

 

As for Beauchamp and Campbell, note that "Sally Beauchamp" was a famous early case of dissociated identity. Jung made his mark as a psychiatrist by studying multiple personalities, which led to his archetypes. Joseph Campbell who used Jung's "individuation" path, "Hero's Journey," is most likely implicated here, as the chess game between Beauchamp & Campbell initiates King Charles' journey into the tunnel (subconscious). It would be typical of Nabokov to spoonerize their names in such a way that there is a connection beyond just the names, i.e. Jungian psychology.

 

I find it interesting, Alexey, that you also believe Kinbote, Shade and Gradus are Botkin, and Sybil and Disa are the same person, which means that the story is of a psychological  breakdown of the type that Jung was a foremost exponent of. You may be right that one could figure this out without Jung (you did), but I prefer to think that Nabokov did this consciously, as part of the theft/appropriation/pale fire theme. If not then you would have to assume that if Nabokov wasn't consciously using the archetypes, then the archetypes must have been using him.

 

Why would he not use Jung, since he parodies so many luminaries, including Freud, Pfisker, and Fromm? He didn't have to like him, although I suspect he did, cautiously. Jung was the pre-eminent psychologist at the time PF was written. He was also Switzerland's most famous resident at the time VN was living there writing both PF and Onegin. Onegin was published by Jung's prestigious publisher, the Bollingen Foundation, which was created to publish Jung's collected works (they also published Joseph Cambell's works, Chapman's Homer, Dante's trilogy, collections of Valerey, Colleridge, Plato, & Aristotle.) I would imagine Nabokov was grateful. He has never said anything negative about Jung.  Jung was a member of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR – the model for PF's IPH), along with 16 other people alluded to in PF. There is much, much more.

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

I do not play chess myself, so I am only guessing at the chess game that surely is being played, most likely the solus rex/sui mate problem that VN discusses. I do, however, believe it is between red and green. Sybil also has associations with the Black Queen (black widow spider and Queen of Spades), but I think in a red/green game red stands for the traditional black.  King Charles signs his name with a black chess king crown, but he changes into disguise he is red and all his loyalists are also red. Sybil and Kinbote are both red. Gerald Emerald, K's antagonist is green. 

Alexey Sklyarenko

2 years 3 months ago

"I find it interesting, Alexey, that you also believe Kinbote, Shade and Gradus are Botkin, and Sybil and Disa are the same person..."

 

Do you mean that I borrowed this idea from you?

 

I also enjoyed "Valerey" very much!

 

 

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

In reply to by Alexey Sklyarenko

No

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

By the way, I should mention that Sally Beauchamp's psychiatrist, William McDougall, was at one time president of the Society for Psychical Research introduced her to the world in 1907 in a paper given to the (SPR/IPH). In 1917 Jung presented his doctoral thesis, “On the Psychology of So-called Occult Phenomena,” which described the phenomena of poltergeists. In his paper, Jung mentions "automatic writing" which seems to reflect Hazel’s barn spirit with the jumble of letters, anagrams, mirror words, etc. 

 

In numerous experiments with beginners, I have noticed, usually at the start of the mental phenomena, a relatively large number of completely meaningless words, often only senseless jumbles of letters. Later all sorts of absurdities are produced, words or whole sentences with the letters transposed all higgledypiggledy or arranged in reverse order, like mirror-writing.

MARYROSS

2 years 3 months ago

Alexey, for you (and anyone who is interested) I am posting a very long post of my notes on the similarities that Jung and VN shared. After this I do not care to engage further at this time, nor do I want to discuss Jung with you again.

 

JUNG & VN SIMILARITIES

 

Autobiography:

 

In the end, the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one…These form the prima material of my scientific work. They were the firery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallized…Therefore, my life has been singularly poor in outward happenings. I cannot tell much about them for it would strike me as hollow and insubstantial. I can understand myself only in light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals.” ( Jung, MDR, p.4-5)

 

“My life has been in a sense the quintessence of what I have written, not the other way around. The way I am and the way I write are a unity. All my ideas and all my endeavors are myself. Thus the ‘autobiography’ is merely the dot on the i.”  (Jung, MDR, p.xii)

 

“The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography”  (VN, SM, p.27)

 

“As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain view which others find inadmissible.”  (Jung, MDR, P. 356)

 

Memory:

 

“In old age one begins to let memories unroll before the mind’s eye and, musing, to recognize oneself in the inner and outer images of the past. This is like a preparation for an existence in the hereafter, just as, in Plato’s view, philosophy is a preparation for death.”  (Jung, MDR P.320)

 

If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments.

"Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737

 

 

Synchronicity:

 

“I have been convinced that at least a part of our psychic existence is characterized by a relativity of space and time. This relativity seems to increase, in proportion to the distance from consciousness, to an absolute condition of timelessness and spacelessness.”  MDR P.305

 

“If, therefore, from the needs of his own heart, or in accordance with the ancient lessons of human wisdom, or out of respect for the psychological fact that ‘telepathic’ perceptions occur, anyone should draw the conclusion that the psyche, in its deepest reaches, participates in a form of existence beyond space and time, and thus partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as ‘eternity’ – then critical reason could counter with no other argument than the ‘nonliquet’ of science

 

“Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time.”  (Jung, Vol.8, CW, P.531)

 

 “…trillions of other trifles occur-all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca NY) is the nucleus” (VN, SM, p218)

 

Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine….That summer I was still far too young to evolve any wealth of “cosmic synchronization”

(VN, SM, p.28)  

 

 

Science:

 

“The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.” (Jung,  MDR, p.356)

 

“The greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery. Moreover, I don’t believe that any science today has pierced any mystery… We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought.”  (VN, SO P.45)

 

 

Spirals: 

 

“The way is not straight but appears to go round in circles. More accurate knowledge has proved it to go in spirals…But, as I say, the process of development proves on closer

inspection to be cyclic or spiral” (Jung, P&A,p 28)

 

The assumption that the human psyche possesses layers that lie below consciousness is not likely to arouse serious opposition. But... there could just as well be layers lying above consciousness... The conscious mind can only claim a relatively central position and must put up with the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides. Unconscious contents connect it backward with the physiological states on the one hand and archetypal data on the other. But it is extended forward by intuitions which are conditioned partly by archetypes and partly by subliminal perceptions depending on the relativity of time and space in the unconscious

 

The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.” (VN, SM,)

“for every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then surely another dimension follows – a special space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again.”  (VN, SM, 301)

 

 

Metaphysics:

 

“When I say that I don’t need to believe in God because I ‘know,’ I mean I know of the existence of God-image in general and in particular. I know it is a matter of a universal experience and, in so far as I am no exception, I know that I have such experiences also, which I call God…So I say: ‘I know Him’. But why should you call this something ‘God’? I would ask: ‘Why not? It has always been called ‘God’.”(L2 Letter to Valentine Brooke P.522)

 

“For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.”  (Jung,MDR P.356)

 

“To be quite candid – and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill – I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.” (VN, SO, p.45)

 

“In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority.” (VN, PF, 175)

 

 

Spiritual Transcendence:

 

“I would never have imagined that any such experience was possible. It was not a product of imagination The visions and experiences were utterly real; there was nothing subjective about them; thy all had a quality of absolute objectivity”  (Jung, MDR, p. 295)

 

“We shy away from the word ‘eternal’, but I can describe the experience only as the ecstasy of a non-temporal state in which present, past and future are one. Everything that happens in time had been brought together into a concrete whole. Nothing was distributed over time, nothing could be measured by temporal concepts. The experience might best be defined as a state of feeling, but one which cannot be produced by imagination.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, P.296)

 

“My vision reeked with truth. It had the tone,

 The quiddity and quaintness of its own

 Reality. It was.” (VN, PF, lines 737-9)

 

 

Mirrors & Reflections & Opposites:

 

“I have often discussed this problem with the late Prof. Paulai, who was also fascinated by what he called the mirror-reflection, causing the existence of two worlds which are really united in the speculum, the mirror, that is lying in the middle” (Jung, Letters Vol.II, P.469)

 

Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.

"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.43

 

“Opposites are extreme qualities of any state, by virtue of which that state is perceived to be real, for they form a potential. The psyche is made up of processes whose energy springs from the equilibration of all kinds of opposites. The spirit/instinct antithesis is only one of the commonest formulations, but it has the advantage of reducing the greatest number of the most important and most complex psychic processes to a common denominator. So regarded, psychic processes seem to be balances of energy flowing between spirit and instinct…” (Jung, The structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Vol.8 Collected works, P. 207)

 

“The union of opposites, which plays such a great and indeed decisive role in alchemy, is of equal significance in the psychic process initiated by the confrontation with the unconscious, so the occurrence of similar or even identical symbols in not surprising”. Vol.13 P.341

 

As in its collective, mythological form, so also the individual shadow contains within it the seed of an enantiodromia, of a conversion into its opposite. (Jung, V.9, p.271)

 

 

Nymphs:

 

“We find it easy enough to accept the classical figures of nymphs thanks to their aesthetic embellishments; but we have no idea that behind these gracious figures there lurks the Dionysian mystery of antiquity, the satyr play with its tragic implications: the bloody dismemberment of the god who has become an animal.” (Jung, p.89)

 

 

Art & Creativity:

 

“I think I was born a painter – really! – and up to my fourteenth year, perhaps, I used to spend most of the day drawing and painting and I was supposed to become a painter in due time.”  (VN, SO, p.17)

 

“What kind of people seek new combinations? They are the men of thought, who have finely differentiated brains coupled with the sensitivity of a woman and the emotionality of a child. They are the slenderest, most delicate branches on the great tree of humanity: they bear the flower and the fruit. Many become brittle too soon, many break off. Differentiation creates in its progress the fit as well as the unfit; wits are mingled with nitwits – there are fools with genius and geniuses with follies…”

 

“From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse.” (Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Vol.8 Collected works, P. 157)

“The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him – on the one hand, the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire…There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire.”

 

“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist, he is ‘man’ in a higher sense ‘ he is ‘collective man’ – one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”  (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul)

 

In a 1954 response to Aniela Jaffe about Herman Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil, Jung writes: I was jealous of Broch because he has succeeded in doing what I had to forbid myself on pain of death. Whirling in the same netherworld maelstrom and wafted to ecstasy by the vision of unfathomable images I heard a voice whispering to me that I

could make it ‘aesthetic,’ all the while knowing that the artist in words within me is the merest embryo, incapable of real artistry.I would have produced nothing but a heap of shards which could never have been turned into a pot. In spite of this ever-present

realization the artist homunculus in me has nourished all sorts of resentments and has obviously taken it very badly that I didn’t press the poet’s wreath on his head (Jung, Letters, 1975, p. 189).

 

 

Secrets and Treasure:

 

“Our greatest treasure is that which is hidden deep within our own subconscious, it is the dark unused part of the self that is in fact light that is unconscious of itself.  (Find)

 

“There is no better means of intensifying the treasured feeling of individuality than the possession of a secret which the individual is pledged to guard”  (VN, SM 342)

 

 

“…the anima contains the secret of the precious stone, for, as Nietzsche says, ‘all joy wants eternity.”, P.99

 

“My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. It induced in me an almost unendurable loneliness. My one great achievement during those years was that I resisted the temptation to talk about it with anyone. Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was already prefigured: today as then, I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, an usually do not even want to know.”  (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, P.42)

 

“ It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important.” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, P.356)

“The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation...All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support ‘isms’, and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task.”  (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, P. 342)

 

 

Insanity v. Enlightenment

 

 

 

Spirits and Poltergeists:

 

“These parapsychic phenomena seem to be connected as a rule with the presence of a medium. They are, so far as my experience goes, the exteriorized effects of unconscious complexes.” Vol.8, p.318, 600

 

Even spirits appear to be psychic phenomena whose origins lie in the unconscious. At all events, the "Invisibles" who are the source of information in this book are shadowy personifications of unconscious contents, conforming to the rule that activated portions of the unconscious assume the character of personalities when they are perceived by the conscious mind.

(PSYCHOLOG Y AN D TH E OCCULT PSYCHOLOGY AND SPIRITUALIS M ,p.164 © 1977 Princeton University Press)

 

Games:

 

One of the most difficult tasks men can perform, however, much others may despise it, is the invention of good games and it cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive selves.  (as quoted by Laurens van der Post, Jung and the Story of Our Time, New York: Vintage Books, 1977, P.411)

 

 

Occult:

 

The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding. It contains as many riddles as the universe with its galactic systems, before whose majestic configurations only a mind lacking in imagination can fail to admit its own insufficiency. This extreme uncertainty of human comprehension makes the intellectualistic hubbub not only ridiculous, but also deplorably dull. If, therefore, from the needs of his own heart, or in accordance with the ancient lessons of human wisdom, or out of respect for the psychological fact that "telepathic" perceptions occur, anyone should draw the conclusion that the psyche, in its deepest reaches, participates in a form of existence beyond space and time, and thus partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as "eternity"—then critical reason could counter with no other argument than the "non liquet" of science. Furthermore, he would have the inestimable advantage of conforming to a bias of the human psyche which has existed from time immemorial and is universal. Anyone who does not draw this conclusion, whether from scepticism or rebellion against tradition, from lack of courage or inadequate psychological experience or thoughtless ignorance, stands very little chance, statistically, of becoming a pioneer of the mind, but has instead the indubitable certainty of coming into conflict with the truths of his blood.

(PSYCHOLOGY AN D TH E OCCULT THE SOUL AND DEATH p.162 © 1977 Princeton University Press)

 

Dreams:

 

“The prospective function…is an anticipation of the unconscious of future conscious achievements, something like a preliminary exercise or sketch, of a plan roughed out in advancel” (Jung V.8, p.255, 493

 

Compare to VN’s Insomniac Dreams.

 

“The whole dream-work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public, and the critic. This simple truth forms the basis for a conception of the dream’s meaning which I have called interpretation on the subjective level. Such an interpretation, as the term implies, conceives all the figures in the dream as personified features of the dreamer’s own personality.” ( Jung, Vol.8, p.266)

 

This is not only applicable to PF, but to ITAB and BS.