Jungian Patterns in Ulysses

ELT 41 : 3 1998 ours has passed into night." Lawrence's less attractive ideas are also revealed , as are his passing rages. Readers are left, as they should be, to try to reconcile the image of an enraged Lawrence turning on his friend Mary Carman because of her interest in younger men (To Jan Juta 13 June 1920) with the approving depiction of just such desires in The Plumed Serpent, let alone the Lawrence who tells Katherine Mansfield (5 December 1918) that "the women must follow [their men] as it were unquestioningly" with the Lawrence who, ten years later, informs Witter Bynner (13 March 1928) "the new relationship ... between men and women" will be based on tenderness and sensitivity, "not the one up and one down, lead on I follow." In the end, readers will come away from the book, if they have learned nothing else about him, with some concept of why Lawrence has fascinated so many people not simply as a writer but as a person. Carol Siegel Washington State University, Vancouver Jungian Patterns in Ulysses Jean Kimball. Odyssey of the Psyche: Jungian Patterns in Joyce's "Ulysses ". Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. xiv + 202 pp. $39.95 FOR MORE than two decades, Jean Kimball has been a significant figure in Joyce circles, delivering papers at national and international symposia and publishing a series of well-regarded essays on Joyce's relationship to Freud, Jung, Rank, and psychological theory in general. In this study of Ulysses she focuses on ways in which Jung's concept of the process of individuation might explain aspects of the novel that resist analysis on the level of realistic plot: the fact, for example, that Bloom seems to "remember" thoughts that Stephen had earlier in the day. Other scholars have seen in Ulysses the operation of Jungian synchronicity, but Kimball rather imaginatively takes the concept a step further, applying it to parallel episodes, both in 1909, in which Jung and Joyce were forced to confront aspects of themselves that shocked them and seemed at odds with their conscious understanding of themselves. In Joyce's case the episode was his fit of jealousy when Vincent Cosgrave falsely claimed to have had an affair with Nora five years earlier; in Jung's case it was his stunned recognition that his treatment of his patient Sabina Spielrein had been tainted by his sexual desire for her. In both cases the men discovered in themselves the work of unconscious, repressed forces with which they needed to come to terms. Jung called the repressed element the Shadow, a concept that became central to his 362 Book reviews psychological theory; Joyce, in Kimball's view, personified the belatedly recognized unconscious forces in himself as Leopold Bloom. As outlined early in the book (16), the four main characters of Ulysses represent aspects of the Jungian model of mind: Stephen the Ego, Mulligan the Persona, Bloom the Shadow, and Molly the Anima. Basically, the Persona is the part of itself that the Ego (conscious mind) recognizes and accepts: in this case, a posture of detached irony. Conversely, the Shadow is what the Ego refuses to acknowledge: the powerful undercurrent of unconscious urges. For men, the Ego is masculine, rational, and it must accept the irrationality of the Shadow before it can enter into a healthy relationship to its feminine side, the Anima, which is projected onto the world in the form of various female figures. The endpoint of this process is the creation of the Self, a figure that does not have a counterpart in the narrative of Ulysses but that stands for the mature artist, Joyce himself. It is Kimball's contention that the various characters all represent aspects of Joyce and that Ulysses may usefully be read as a psychic drama in which Joyce explores his own personality. An argument of this sort risks becoming overly reductive, but Kimball avoids that by repeating that the text may also be read in other ways and that she is merely following a line of reasoning that seems to work rather well. Nor does she claim that Joyce was directly influenced by Jung or that he had a detailed knowledge of...