Jung and the Jungians on Myth: An Introduction (review)

BOOK NOTES Since the ostensive moment, as Fry conceives it, inherently eschews meaning, he must, and does at numerous places throughout his text, perform ostensión rather than define it. Although free from meaning-dependence, the ostensive moment is both intentional (in the phenomenological sense, a consciousness ofsomething) and, in fact, preconceptual (11). Though part ofa culture-specific artifact, it is not constructed; and, altiiough dialectically interconnected with reference and form, it resists being subsumed by history or structure (5-6). Further, ostensión is not to be aligned with the sublime (a potential misreading which Fry emphatically preempts in his introduction and subsequently in Chapter 7), epiphany (all ofPart Two, and Chapter 5 specifically), or social or aestiietic indifference (Chapter 6). And when Fry writes elsewhere that the intentionality ofostensión involves an awareness ofthe unintended that is either expressed as such or provokes, as non-construction, that compensatory construction ofintentional consciousness with which the notion of"hieropoetics" confuses it (29), comparatists familiarwith Maurice Blanchot's work—whose essay, "Literature and me Right to Death," Fry aptly calls "Blanchot's defense ofpoetry" (8)—can begin to detect how central the movement ofnegativity is to Fry's argument. Phenomenology, as it is re-emerging in Anglo-American literary studies today, presumably affords the critic a more sophisticated vocabulary than its now lessfashionable offspring deconstruction, without requiring the critic to elaborate precisely , for example, how intentionality can be preconceptual, or how Heideggerian Care (arguablypace Heidegger himself) can be synonymous witii Being-for-others (24, 27). Still, Fry's argument is engaging, and his writing style is dense and subtle. But readers should realize mat his interpretations ofWordsworth (The Prelude, The Excursion 5-7), Byron (Childe Harold3-4), Keats ("To Autumn"), and Dickinson ("I heard a fly buzz"), are more concerned with ostensión as poetry's condition of possibility than as a phenomenon in specific poems. Moreover, in using diese poems to advance an argument about "literariness" in a transhistorical sense, Fry's book cannot help making big claims in spite of itself: "my argument itselfwill not be recognized for what it is unless its modest scope is kept constantly in view," Fry warns us in words incorporated verbatim from a 1987 article. "It will be misread and will misread itself—perhaps inevitably in both cases—wherever it comes to function as a poetics" (11), leaving us to wonder ifsince 1987 Fry could not have taken (or simply did not want to take) more trouble to make his defense ofpoetry less susceptible to misreading. Thomas M. Orange University ofWestern Ontario STEVEN F. WALKER Jung andtheJunglans on Myth: An Introduction. New York: Garland, 1995. xii + 198 pp. The work ofJoseph Campbell and New Age Religion have revived an interest in the archetypal theories ofCarl Jung and in mythology. Steven F. Walker, AssoVoI . 21 (1997): 172 THE COMPAKATIST date Professor of Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, provides a welcome service in clarifying Jung's conception of myth, offering examples of a Jungian criticism ofliterature, and sorting through much contemporary myth and archetypal criticism. Drawing extensively on Jung's letters as well as his other writings, Walker attempts to sort out Jung's occasionally fuzzy concepts ofmyth, Collective Unconsciousness , and Archetype and explain their relation to the psyche. An empiricist, Jung insisted that his views on myth and archetypes derived from close observations . The underlying archetype, he suggested, was grounded in the biological structure ofme organism, in constellations ofunconscious forces that condition our experience ofthe world and psyche. Out ofdiese emerge archetypal images, the myriad of"visualizations" or "personifications" ofme archetypes, followed by their cultural representations, the symbols, and out ofthese the myth. For Jung, dreams on me individual level and myths in the collective life ofthe culture play compensatory roles, balancing inadequacies. Thus in the myth ofFaust, for instance, Gretchen is an archetypal image ofthe Eternal Feminine, compensating for the search ofknowledge in modern society symbolized by Faust. Having developed die basic vocabulary, Walker then devotes two chapters to the archetypal images ofdie psyche. These include the Shadow, the Anima and Animus, die Wise Old Man, the Great Mother, the Divine Child, and the Self. Central to Jung's study ofmyth was the...