Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

13. Eiseley and Jung

13 Eiseley and Jung Structuralism’s Invisible Pyramid john nizalowski 273 In his essay “Loren Eiseley’s Immense Journey,” Andrew J. Angyal celebrates the revered nature writer’s unconventional public stance: “As Eiseley warns his readers repeatedly, he is not a spokesman for conventional science. Instead, he is a poet-shaman, a wizard-alchemist who adopts the disguise of a changeling” (70). The roots of this unorthodox self-definition are found in the depth psychology of Carl Jung. There are two central tenets of Jung’s philosophical system that range throughout Eiseley’s writing: the importance of the collective unconscious in shaping the structures of human intelligence and the essential dualism of human culture and experience. Beginning with The Immense Journey, Eiseley establishes the Jungian features of his writing. In the “The Dream Animal”�his discussion of the human evolutionary achievement of larger brains, language, and a sociocultural drive�Eiseley argues for the essential importance of the unconscious dream realm with its archetypal mythological symbolism in determining human cognition and perception. At the same time, he notes the dualisms that our mental structures produced: “He was becoming something the world had never seen before�a dream animal�living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation. . . . The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams. . . . The Eden of the eternal present that the animal world had known for ages was shattered at last. Through the human mind, time and darkness, good and evil, would enter and possess the world” (120–21). Nearly the same concepts appear over a decade later in “The Star Thrower,” though in a darker, more pessimistic aspect: “Two forces struggle perpetually in our bodies: Yam, the old sea dragon of the original Biblical darkness, and, arrayed against him, some wisp of dancing Eiseley and Jung 274 light that would have us linger, wistful, in our human form. ‘Tarry thou, till I come again’�an old legend survives among us of the admonition given by Jesus to the Wandering Jew. The words are applicable to all of us. Deep-hidden in the human psyche there is a similar injunction . . . a plea to wait upon some transcendent lesson preparing in the mind itself” (Unexpected 76). However, while Eiseley’s Jungian content is pervasive, he rarely mentions Jung directly in his writings. He quotes Jung in “Walden: Thoreau’s Unfinished Business,” and there are other scattered references to Jung, most notably in The Lost Notebooks, but overall, Eiseley’s references to Jung are sparse. Still, as the quotes from The Immense Journey and The Unexpected Universe indicate, there is a strong Jungian influence on Eiseley’s work. So why the near silence about Jung in the essays? While Eiseley probably knew about Jung as early as the 1930s, he may not have actually studied Jung’s writings until the 1960s. For instance, the first journal entry in The Lost Notebooks that cites Jung is from 1969 (189), and the pieces that actually mention Jung or use Jungian terms, such as “Walden: Thoreau’s Unfinished Business” and “Dance of the Frogs,” were published in The Star Thrower, his final collection. But then why do Jungian concepts span Eiseley’s oeuvre, starting with The Immense Journey? It is likely that Eiseley, through the influences of structural anthropology, developed parallel ideas to Jung’s and then realized the Jungian connection in the 1960s. A similar situation holds between Eiseley and the transcendentalists . As noted by Angyal in Loren Eiseley: “With Emerson and Thoreau, the issue is not so much their influence as a coincidence of their thought with Eiseley’s. Quite correctly, Eiseley insists in his autobiography upon the originality of his thought, pointing out that he did not return to literary studies until late in his life” (88–89). I believe the same could be said for Jung. Eiseley’s background as an anthropologist exposed him to writers who influenced Jung or whom Jung influenced. Sociologists and anthropologists such as Emile Durkheim and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, writers whom Eiseley would have encountered as an academic anthropologist in the 1930s and 1940s, influenced Jung while he was developing the theory of the collective unconscious. Also, we know john nizalowski 275 that Eiseley owned books by Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology, and cited him in The Invisible Pyramid (Carrithers, Mumford 249). As explained by John...