The monster within me carl jung11/20/2022 ![]() ![]() Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer. This remark occurred to me when I was ploughing through Ulysses for the first time. One day he stopped me on the street and asked, “Do you know how the devil tortures the souls in hell?” When I said no, he declared, “He keeps them waiting.” And with that he walked away. I had an uncle whose thinking was always to the point. If we regard the book from the side of technical artistry, it is a positively brilliant and hellish monster-birth.Īnd yet this creative merit does nothing in the way of alleviating Jung’s escalating irritation, which he goes on to articulate ever more floridly: Of course, this outrage over hopelessness and nothingness is only natural for a man who believed that “man cannot stand a meaningless life” and that “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” Jung, indeed, is self-aware enough to separate his deep disappointment in the book’s substance from the genius of Joyce’s style, adding a reluctant recognition of the latter: It not only begins and ends in nothingness, but it consists of nothing but nothingness. This thoroughly hopeless emptiness is the dominant note of the whole book. It thus gives cruelest expressions to that emptiness which is both breath taking and stifling, which is under such tension, or is so filled to bursting, as to grow unbearable. There is not a single place where he can seat himself, drunk with memories, and from which he can happily consider the stretch of the road he has covered, be it one hundred pages or even less… But no! The pitiless and uninterrupted stream rolls by, and its velocity or precipitation grows in the last forty pages till it sweeps away even the marks of punctuation. ![]() As far as my glance reaches, there are in those seven hundred and thirty-five pages no obvious repetitions and not a single hallowed island where the long-suffering reader may come to rest. Is all of this perhaps one single, immensely long and excessively complicated Strindbergian pronouncement upon the essence of human life, and one which, to the reader’s dismay, is never finished? Perhaps it does touch upon the essence of life but quite certainly it touches upon life’s ten thousand surfaces and their hundred thousand color gradations. The stream beings in the void and ends in the void. Ulysses is a book which pours along for seven hundred and thirty-five pages, a stream of time of seven hundred and thirty-five days which all consist in one single and senseless every day of Everyman, the completely irrelevant 16th day of June 1904, in Dublin - a day on which, in all truth, nothing happens. But this strange and all too human duality is best exemplified by a curious letter Jung sent to Joyce shortly after the review was published, reproduced below. It is the experience that Jung criticizes - well capable of admitting Joyce’s artistic genius, he remains nonetheless amusingly aggravated by the book’s effect on him. Found in the second volume of Robert Deming’s James Joyce: The Critical Heritage ( public library), the review is intriguing and even irresistibly delightful - especially for me, as someone who believes that the “critic” better serves the public as a celebrator rather than eviscerator - because Jung’s disgruntlement seems directed at his own exasperation, almost as though he was more upset with his own response to reading the book than with Joyce for writing it. This frustration is what led legendary Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung - founding father of modern analytical psychology, and a great champion of the human spirit - to write a blistering review of Ulysses a decade after the novel’s release, published in the German journal Europäische Revue in September of 1932. (Marilyn Monroe did all three - a fact that might surprise the judgmental and those who subscribe to limiting beliefs about the false divide between pop culture and “high” culture.) With its protracted stream-of-consciousness narrative, which stretches a single day across 735 pages, Ulysses can be particularly challenging and frustrating for a mind longing for speed of thought. It is a book that few people begin, even fewer finish, and fewer still reread. One of the literary canon’s least common candidates for rereading is James Joyce’s sprawling 735-page novel Ulysses, serialized in installments between 19, and eventually published in its totality by legendary literary steward Sylvia Beach on Joyce’s fortieth birthday: February 2, 1922. ![]() ![]() “Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!” young Susan Sontag wrote in contemplating the pleasures of rereading. ![]()
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