Post-Jungian Criticism: Theory and Practice

Sharing a Shadow: The Image of the Shrouded Stranger in the Works of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

Jung conceived of the attempt to know the shadow as “a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality” (“Shadow” 8), and the casting of this abstract moral problem in concrete terms has historically been the province of poets, novelists, and dramatists. By examining literature as a psychic process, we gain insight into the way the “relative evil” of the personal shadow is transformed into the “absolute evil” of a verbal icon. One way to understand the relationship between the personal images of dreams and imaginative fantasies and the imagery of literary symbolism is to view literature humanistically. Its psychological function is, in part, both to reveal the connections between personal motivations and social movements and to call attention to the process by which an individual comes to recognize those connections. To illustrate how the making of literature bears on our understanding of the shadow, I will contrast the attempts of two postmodern American authors, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—the first a confessional poet, the second an autobiographical novelist—to know their shadows in both their personal and archetypal dimensions and to represent this knowledge in literary images. I chose these two writers in part because of their close friendship in the late 1940s and in part because of the mutual influence obvious in their works, but mainly because of the 223 Sharing a Shadow The Image of the Shrouded Stranger in the Works of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg ������ JAMES T. JONES unusual circumstance that their shadows appeared to them in the same form in their dreams: that of the Shrouded Stranger. At the end of a 1946 radio broadcast, Jung asked a (perhaps rhetorical ) question that could have been posed to the entire generation of postwar writers: “The destructive power of our weapons has increased beyond all measure, and this forces a psychological question on mankind: Is the mental and moral condition of the men who decide on the use of these weapons equal to the enormity of the possible consequences ?” (“Fight” 226). In a lecture delivered less than two years after this broadcast, he insisted that the contents of the shadow, unlike the other archetypes, “can in large measure be inferred from the contents of the personal unconscious” (“Shadow” 8). The moral condition of the world’s leaders, therefore, lies partly in their ability to recognize the personal shadow in their weapons of mass destruction. Many artists undertook to show them the way. Both Ginsberg and Kerouac spent years trying to respond artistically to the destruction of World War II and to the threat of nuclear holocaust. Ginsberg responded in such notable works as the title poem of his 1970s collection Plutonian Ode and in late works such as his operatic collaboration with Philip Glass, Hydrogen Jukebox; Kerouac in his virtual elimination of violence from the texts of his thirteen autobiographical novels. But the road to their respective treatments began for both writers in New York City in the late 1940s with an exploration of the shadow. Go Moan for Man, a film about Jack Kerouac released in February 2000 which one critic has dubbed “the definitive Kerouac documentary ,” begins and ends with the image of an old man, hooded and cloaked and carrying a staff, walking through a desert. (See figure 3.) Though most readers of Kerouac will recognize this figure as a presence (rather than an actual character) from his most famous novel, On the Road, they would probably not accord it the status of “the most essential image in Kerouac,” the characterization given it by Doug Sharples, who wrote and directed the film. In May 2000, I interviewed Sharples at the Real Films studio in Wakonda, South Dakota. In his very first reading of On the Road in the late 1950s, Sharples recognized a numinous quality in the image Kerouac named “the Shrouded Stranger.” Indeed, as a child growing up in Clinton, Iowa, in the early 1950s, he had had a vision of an old man in a white beard and robes. He also frequently daydreamed that he himself was a bearded prophet. Much later, when he came to make his thesis film in graduate school in the late 1960s, he found himself transforming his childhood visions into the character of a psychopath who pursues the protagonist of the story with a note. In 1992, as he studied the footage he had been shooting for the 224 James T. Jones FIGURE...