Anima and Africa

Jungian Essays on Psyche, Land, and Literature

Matthew A. Fike

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351850803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria africana

C. G. Jung understood the anima in a wide variety of ways but especially as a multifaceted archetype and as a field of energy. In Anima and Africa: Jungian Essays on Psyche, Land, and Literature, Matthew A. Fike uses these principles to analyze male characters in well-known British, American, and African fiction.

Jung wrote frequently about the Kore (maiden, matron, crone) and the "stages of eroticism" (Eve, Mary, Helen, Sophia). The feminine principle's many aspects resonate throughout the study and are emphasized in the opening chapters on Ernest Hemingway, Henry Rider Haggard, and Olive Schreiner. The anima-as-field can be "tapped" just as the collective unconscious can be reached through nekyia or descent. These processes are discussed in the middle chapters on novels by Laurens van der Post, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee. The final chapters emphasize the anima's role in political/colonial dysfunction in novels by Barbara Kingsolver, Chinua Achebe/Nadine Gordimer, and Aphra Behn.

Anima and Africa applies Jung's African journeys to literary texts, explores his interest in Haggard, and provides fresh insights into van der Post's late novels. The study discovers Lessing's use of Jung's autobiography, deepens the scholarship on Coetzee's use of Faust, and explores the anima's relationship to the personal and collective shadow. It will be essential reading for academics and scholars of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, literary studies, and postcolonial studies, and will also appeal to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists in practice and in training.

1
Ernest Hemingway’s Francis Macomber in “God’s Country”

In Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway states: “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water” (192).¹ “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” one of two stories that arose from Hemingway’s African safari, is a fine illustration of the “ice-berg” principle. Since what lies beneath its action and dialogue are the characters’ psychological dynamics, C. G. Jung’s insights into the personal and collective unconscious, along with the discoveries he made while himself in Africa, are especially relevant. In the two previous decades, studies by Michael Vannoy Adams, Anthony Stevens (Two Million), and Blake Burleson have identified Jung’s African expedition as the provenance of many assumptions within his model of the psyche, but the trip-theory nexus has relevance to Jungian literary criticism as well. Like most studies of “Francis Macomber,” Chapter 1 is “traditional” rather than postmodern, though it is post-Jungian in acknowledging the essentialism and misogyny of Jung’s statements about the feminine, along with the racism of his view of the primitive. Jung is useful in many respects, including his theories’ participation in some of the problematic cultural assumptions that animate Hemingway’s story.

The Jungian rubric, however, is surprisingly absent from previous psychological approaches to “Francis Macomber” that sound much of the submerged seven-eighths.² To begin with Horst Breuer’s view, Francis plays the role of the child who rejects “mother-imago” Margot and embraces father-figure Wilson (193–94). Joseph DeFalco also sees Wilson as “not unlike an authority-father figure” (203), and Richard B. Hovey views him as a surrogate father (126). Kenneth W. Harrow tracks Francis’s progress through Lacan’s three stages of the Oedipus complex—desire for the mother, repression of desire because of fear of castration, and accession to paternal authority. In another Lacanian study, Bennett Kravitz sees “the Macombers’ marriage as a symbiotic relationship” in which husband and wife fill each other’s “void of ‘ego incompleteness’ ” (84). Using Penelope Brown’s concepts of polite linguistic discourse to analyze the dialogue’s psychological significance, Donald E. Hardy suggests that Francis forsakes “not his rational faculties . . . but the control of his own positive face” (132). Finally, in the study most relevant to this chapter, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama uses evolutionary psychology to analyze the dynamics among the three central characters. Margot’s “female reproductive value” (143), Wilson’s prowess in hunting, and Francis’s ability to make money come into conflict, generating infidelity, sexual jealousy, and possibly murder. Although Sugiyama does not mention Virgil Hutton’s well-known study, her evolutionary approach to Margot—that she is trying to maximize her options—sensibly augments his claim that “being upset over her husband’s display of weakness” means that Margot does not really wish “to be the dominating female” (248–49). Instead, she simply wishes to be well cared for by the fittest male.

Although Sugiyama generalizes about “the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness” (143), there is no mention that the African savanna, as Jung knew well, is the place where our species evolved. As Burleson notes in Jung in Africa, that continent is “the ancestral home of the human brain”; it is “an established fact of paleontology [that] Homo sapiens originated in East Africa. We now know that we are all Africans” (18, 62).³ The story’s description of “the parklike wooded rolling country on the far side” and “the untracked, parklike country” makes it clear that the setting is the savanna where humans evolved (21). Thus, Hemingway’s modern characters enact ancient drives in the very place where evolution etched them permanently into the human psyche.

Along with complementing Freudian/Lacanian and evolutionary readings of “Francis Macomber,” a Jungian psychological approach challenges the doubt that various scholars have expressed with regard to the title character’s psychological state in the moments prior to his death. They believe that his change from cowardice to bravery is “much too improbable” (Gardner 188), that “the fate of Macomber’s manhood [is] undecidable” (Strychacz 18), and that he “illustrates no dramatic change from boyish cowardice to heroic manhood” (Hutton 248), perhaps because his happiness is not “an integrative form of development, but [merely] an abrupt re-cathexis” (Breuer 195). The Jungian equivalent of these claims would be that Macomber’s change is impermanent because he experiences enantiodromia, a swing between the opposites of negative inflation and positive inflation. DeFalco, however, correctly identifies Francis’s experiences as “the journey toward individuation” (206), though the statement’s Jungian resonance is left unexplored. For Jung, individuation means a movement toward psychic wholeness, or the Self, when the unconscious becomes conscious; in this fashion, greater psychic integration leads out of the inflationary cycle toward sustainable well-being. Hemingway hints that Francis’s change is genuine and permanent, and this chapter will argue that his individuation becomes clearer if the story is read through a Jungian psychological lens. In brief, Francis, a puer aeternus and introverted thinker, overcomes his initial mother complex by doing shadow work with his hunting guide, Robert Wilson. As the story progresses, Francis makes the unconscious more conscious through dreaming and then connects with the archaic/primordial man buried deeply below his modern civilized persona. Like the reader who must infer the seven-eighths below the story’s surface, Francis discovers psychic resources that lie below the veneer of his comfortable lifestyle, “the fairytale world of high society” (Gaillard 32).

Jung and Africa

It is hard to imagine two more diverse figures than Hemingway and Jung—the macho sportsman and the learned doctor; but both visited east Africa, though for vastly different reasons. Hemingway went on a three-month safari in the summer of 1933, published an account of the hunt in Green Hills of Africa in 1935, and used some of the book’s details in “Francis Macomber,” which appeared in the September 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan. Jung made two trips to Africa: the first was to Tunis and Algiers in 1920; then for five months in 1925–1926 his “Bugishu Psychological Expedition” (BPE) journeyed through Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, and Egypt. Although his main objective was to study Africans’ dreams, the trip afforded him the opportunity to observe what happened to himself, a white European, in a remote third-world setting. The resulting experiences and insights provide a relevant lens through which fresh perspectives on “Francis Macomber” may be discovered.

Jung believes that consciousness is not original to our species but rather that consciousness emerged in prehistory and is still developing. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he identifies the “original state of twilight consciousness” in which humans “had existed from time immemorial” and from which they emerged “to become aware of their own existence,” that is, to achieve consciousness as we know it (240). A lyrical passage in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious describes how that transformation may have occurred:

I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man. Every advance, even the smallest, along this path of conscious realization adds that much to the world.

(CW 9i, par. 177)

Noting the contrast to the natural world, which “was still in its primeval state” and “did not know that it was,” Jung, in an imaginative reverie, experiences the moment when consciousness emerged from primordial twilight. The last three sentences of his statement evince both the primitive’s movement from twilight to consciousness (the world’s spring into being) and the aware person’s journey toward maximal consciousness. In other words, progress continues in the present within each conscious person. It is as if the evolution of human consciousness and the individual person’s individuation are not separate achievements. Rather, one person’s movement toward greater awareness mirrors the species’ emergence from semi-consciousness.

Although Africa is the locale where consciousness emerged, Burleson notes that Jung understood the continent to represent the unconscious (200). It follows that the human awareness that Jung observed there diverges markedly from his own highly rational European way of thinking. Unfortunately, some of his further conclusions about the psychology of indigenous peoples are in sync with racist assumptions. He believes, for example, that Africans, like children or adolescents, are dominated by emotion—“these people live from their affects” (MDR 239–44). He also considers them child-like in their participation mystique, a term borrowed from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.⁴ In this magical mentality events are attributed to “so-called supernatural powers” rather than natural causes (CW 10, par. 113), and there is no distinction between the perceiving subject and the perceived object. Jung states: “For primitive man . . . the psychic and the objective coalesce in the external world. . . . Psychic happenings take place outside him in an objective way” (CW 10, par. 128). For Jung, whereas modern persons achieve psychic differentiation, “primitives” are less differentiated (CW 7, par. 156). Being “primitive” means projecting inner content onto the world and blurring the difference.⁵

Perhaps participation mystique fosters the ability to see the basic unity of all life rather than divisions like the one between hunter and hunted. Jung’s experiences, reported in his Visions seminar, bear out the point. One morning he was astonished to discover that a lion that lived nearby had left tracks outside his tent. The natives told him, “It is not bad, it is our lion.” Additional evidence came when Jung realized “the fact that leopards go hunting with you provided you carry your shotgun and not your big caliber gun; when you carry your big gun no leopard will appear.” When his company shot a guinea fowl, the leopard made off with it before the hunters could reach it. The latter experience implies an almost intellectual process on the leopard’s part, as well as partnership—human and big cat working together. Commenting on these episodes, Jung suggests, “It is quite possible that participation mystique with the non-ego means a certain change, not only in yourself, but also in the surrounding conditions” (qtd. in Burleson 135–36).⁶ In other words, when one perceives the world in human terms, the observed animal returns the favor. A lion or leopard—dangerous prey—is no longer Other but brother. Of course, the main characters in “Francis Macomber” wish only to hunt and destroy great game, but the narrator does describe a wounded lion’s agony from the animal’s point of view. As Carey Voeller states, “The beast’s humanized, dying moments function as the key factor in forging the connection of humankind with the animal world” (232). Although Hemingway went to Africa to take life and fancied himself a great white hunter, including the lion’s point of view suggests that he may have developed some sense of life’s overarching unity.

Participation mystique, however, is problematic when applied to an indigenous people because it implies a linkage between their race and their psychology.⁷ A more fundamental, less controversial element of the primitive is that we as civilized persons have “those historical layers in ourselves” that link us to primitive times (Jung, MDR 244). In “Archaic Man,” Jung states: “it is not only primitive man whose psychology is archaic. It is the psychology also of modern, civilized man, and not merely of individual ‘throw-backs’ in modern society. On the contrary, every civilized human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche” (CW 10, par. 105). Burleson explains that when humans evolved out of “the ubiquitous unconscious,” they carried with them “an undifferentiated layer of the human (and animal) psyche” (16). This layer can be observed, Jung believes, in the daily lives of modern-day primitives such as those he encountered on the BPE (CW 18, par. 18, 1288). But because the ancient wellspring is deeply buried, a modern civilized person like Francis suffers from malaise, psychic fragmentation, and a loss of vital wholeness.

In the decades when Jung’s BPE and Hemingway’s safari took place, journeying to Africa was considered therapeutic precisely because it threw the archaic in human psychology into bold relief. As Marianna Torgovnick states in her book Primitive Passions, “ ‘The primitive’ was widely valued as a way station or spa for men suffering from cultural alienation and psychic distress” (qtd. in Burleson 15).⁸ She adds that André Gide, D. H. Lawrence, and others including Jung visited the continent. Jung emphasizes the continent’s positive effect: “these seemingly alien and wholly different Arab surroundings awaken an archetypal memory of an only too well known prehistoric past which apparently we have entirely forgotten. We are remembering a potentiality of life which has been overgrown by civilization, but which in certain places is still existent” (MDR 245–46). As regards accessing the archaic in the civilized person, Jung biographer Barbara Hannah notes that encounters with indigenous peoples and animals mean that “in Africa you are in a way meeting those layers outside.” Her sense that Africa “is the country of the Self, not of the ego” has particular significance in light of Jung’s No. 1 and No. 2 personalities (172). Whereas No. 1 is “the ego-centered, time-bound person,” No. 2 is “the Self-centered, timeless person of the collective unconscious” (Burleson 61). Jung went to Africa to seek relief from the stress of his clinical practice, the province of the ego, by researching the unconscious in others and by exploring its nether reaches in himself.

Such exploration of the deep unconscious can be perilous, as the Swahili word shenzi attests. In Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway translates the word as “a wild man” (180). Burleson states that it means “ ‘uncivilized’ ” and identifies a series of English equivalents: “Going shenzi meant ‘going black’, ‘going primitive’, ‘going native’, ‘going insane’ ” (188). In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung states that “going black” means sleeping with black women (262). Cleary shenzi has racist undertones to the contemporary ear; but Adams, in his helpful study of race, understands that the term, which is British in origin, also means “to revert . . . to an earlier and lower state . . . [t]o go black is to ‘go back’—in time and space” (51–52). For example, Jung interpreted his dream, in which his African American barber in Chattanooga, Tennessee, applied a curling iron to Jung’s hair (in order to make it “kinky” like “Negro hair”), as a warning that his No. 1 personality was in danger of shenzi because his No. 2 personality was reverting to an earlier, more unconscious state by succumbing to participation mystique (MDR 272). Although a more positive interpreta...