Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut

Golden Apples of the Monkey House

Steve Gronert Ellerhoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138937307
• eBook ISBN: 9781317384915
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria nordamericana

In this book, Steve Gronert Ellerhoff explores short stories by Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut, written between 1943 and 1968, with a post-Jungian approach. Drawing upon archetypal theories of myth from Joseph Campbell, James Hillman and their forbearer C. G. Jung, Ellerhoff demonstrates how short fiction follows archetypal patterns that can illuminate our understanding of the authors, their times, and their culture. In practice, a post-Jungian 'mythodology' is shown to yield great insights for the literary criticism of short fiction.

Chapters in this volume carefully contextualise and historicize each story, including Bradbury and Vonnegut's earliest and most imaginatively fantastic works. The archetypal constellations shaping Vonnegut's early works are shown to be war and fragmentation, while those in Bradbury's are family and the wholeness of the sun. Analysis is complemented by the explored significance of illustrations that featured alongside the stories in their first publications. By uncovering the ways these popular writers redressed old myths in new tropes—and coined new narrative elements for hopes and fears born of their era—the book reveals a fresh method which can be applied to all imaginative short stories, increasing understanding and critical engagement.

Post-Jungian Psychology and the Short Stories of Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut is an important text for a number of fields, from Jungian and Post-Jungian studies to short story theoriesand American studies to Bradbury and Vonnegut studies. Scholars and students of literature will come away with a renewed appreciation for an archetypal approach to criticism, while the book will also be of great interest to practising depth psychologists seeking to incorporate short stories into therapy.

Chapter 1
A post-Jungian mythodology for reading short stories

“I love you sons of bitches,” Eliot said in Milford. “You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”

Kurt Vonnegut
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
(NS 201–2)

In 1999, Peter Reed published the remainder of Kurt Vonnegut’s uncollected short stories in Bagombo Snuff Box. Prior to this, in 1977, Jerome Klinkowitz and Donald Lawler encouraged readers to uncover these short works, “a lost art” long out of print and decades from seeing it again (54), at libraries by providing “instructions for an entire book of undiscovered Kurt Vonnegut stories, never collected except in this homemade work you can assemble for yourself” (53). Vonnegut, assessing the “mildness and innocence and clumsiness” of these stories, claimed “there is no greatness in this or my other collection, nor was there meant to be” (BSB 2, 3). He tells us that in writing the short stories of his early career, “All I wanted to do was support a family” (BSB 1). To date, only one full-length study on his short stories has appeared, Reed’s The Short Fiction of Kurt Vonnegut. Ray Bradbury’s short stories have accrued a similarly meager place in literary criticism, although Jonathan R. Eller is currently editing them in authoritative critical editions. This study is cast with hope of drawing attention to these writers’ short fiction, arguing that their practically produced works contain multitudes.

Though Vonnegut abandoned the form, he offers rules for writing short stories – what he, experienced at leading graduate workshops, calls “Creative Writing 101”:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things – reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading character, make awful things happen to them – in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

(BSB 9–10)

Vonnegut also praises Flannery O’Connor, “the greatest American short story writer of my generation” (BSB 10), and Ray Bradbury, who he deems “sure as heck prescient” in his future-focused stories (BSB 8). Bradbury never taught creative writing but often guest lectured on the craft. In 1990 he published an exuberant manifesto of essays, written between 1961 and 1990, titled Zen in the Art of Writing. His advice is evangelical, preaching enjoyment in writing and the creation of short stories in great quantity:

[T]he first thing a writer should be is – excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health. […]

[Write one]-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.

For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.

(4, 130–131)

Differences individualize these writers’ mature positions on advice for those beginning to write. Differences also individualize the stories they wrote.

This study spins a handful of threads through stories by both authors: periodical studies, post-Jungian theories of myth, short story theories, American culture and history. I use initial publications of stories by both authors throughout this volume because they offer glimpses of their own individual historical moments by being printed alongside other stories and advertisements – and in publication formats ranging from pulps to “slicks.” As Eller said when I met him at the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University Indianapolis, “You are looking at versions of these stories that hardly anybody has seen since they first appeared.” Agreeing with Kasia Boddy that “Where we read the story shapes the expectations we bring to our reading of it, and thus the effect it has on us” (117), I also take artwork published with these stories into account. Vonnegut says, “Illustrators during the golden age of American magazine fiction used to get as much money as the authors whose stories they illustrated. They were often as famous as, or even more famous than, the authors” (BSB 4). The art and ads are examined for context and surprising juxtapositions as they arise in striking ways with each story. Another reason for relying on original publications has to do with Bradbury’s tendency of tweaking or heavily revising stories when later collected, changing details as first presented in the era in question.

Bradbury published over four hundred short stories in his lifetime; Vonnegut published forty-seven. Selection pools differing in quantity by ten times, with analyses of many stories left on the cutting room floor, I worked to attempt something like balance in selecting Vonnegut’s stories while sifting through Bradbury’s catalog. Only through this process did I realize the stories I wanted to talk about, save a couple outliers, were published between WWII and the Kennedy assassination. Thus, this study focuses by and large on two decades of American culture, ranging from 1943 to 1963, a time when pulps and “slicks” alike started out thriving and ended up nearly perishing with the spread of television. Reflecting on the health benefits, mental and restful, Vonnegut likened the short story form as akin to a “Buddhist catnap”: “[A] short story, because of its physiological and psychological effects on a human being, is more closely related to Buddhist styles of meditation than it is to any other form of narrative entertainment” (5). Sharing an interest in the psychology of stories, research led me to short story theorists and psychoanalysts from Charles E. May to Rollo May. My initial question, prior to applying for this course of study, as I was busy writing my own fiction, was whether or not short stories behave like myths. Sensing a correlation, I sought a way of expressing some ways in which they do.

Vonnegut and Bradbury have received attention for writing myths from the earliest days of scholarship on their work.¹ This continues to this day, for instance, in Gilbert McInnis’s exciting contribution to Vonnegut studies: Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut (2011). What has been missing from these studies is a comprehensive presentation of a theoretical framework for talking about myth. Chapter 1 exists in this study for the sole reason of laying out a “mythodology” for reading short stories with a post-Jungian approach. There are many theories of myth – so many that Robert Segal has built his scholarship on identifying and differentiating them. We proceed with a post-Jungian perspective on myth, particularly that developed by comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), supporting its application to the interpretation of literature, and specifically short stories. Campbell’s work, contemporaneous with what Donald E. Pease calls the Myth and Symbol school of American studies, grew out of the same temporal and cultural context that informed the writing of Bradbury and Vonnegut’s short stories. The theoretical pairing with the texts examined is not accidental. It does not, however, pretend to offer anything approaching a final word on how to interpret myths, which I regard as impossible.

The stories analyzed in the following book present opportunities to reflect on and experience aspects of myths – the archetypes – that find expression in a society; are conditioned specifically in time, place, and culture(s); and are lived in the broadest universal conditions of life for human beings. Imaginative imagery in these stories may be unrealistic, but all bear relation to reality, for, as Jungian analyst Jean Knox says, “Symbolic meaning depends on the process of evaluation and comparison of experiences with each other – in other words it depends on information from the real world” (201). When it comes to the notion of universality, Jungian literary critic Inez Martinez issues a warning we shall heed:

Once a story attains the status of myth, it takes on an aura of authorless divine revelation, of numinosity, suggesting a realm beyond human limitation. This aspect of myth can make our lives feel meaningful and purposeful. The shadow of this power, however, is the universalizing of cultural moments of myth as if they apply to all human experience, thus naturalizing or even divinizing a particular cultural moment, thereby creating a brake on what is considered human and natural.

(“Unconsciousness and Survival” 2)

We will all, for instance, live and die, but how and why are nuanced individually by factors beyond conscious organization. Stories, great and crummy, are time capsules for the hopes and anxieties – the complexes – of their own eras. In delving into my selection of Vonnegut and Bradbury’s stories, we can see American myths, new and old, packaged and repackaged, in a historical context, in action, and in relation to the complexes of our own day. Before we address those stories, however, we must essay a post-Jungian approach to reading short stories as myths.

What we talk about when we talk about myth

Listen for the word “myth” and you will often hear it taking the fall for others, words like “bunkus,” “hooey,” and “lies.” Today “myth” is popularly synonymous with “falsehood.” The widespread understanding of myth syncs with C. S. Lewis’s opinion “that myths [are] lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver’” (Tolkien 85). Psychiatrist Rollo May (1909–1994), who called the last “our mainly mythless century” (Cry for Myth 47), objected to myth’s denigration, saying, “This is an error that could be committed only by a society that has become so inebriated with adding up empirical facts that it seals off the deeper wisdom of human history” (Courage to Create 28). The twentieth century saw some thinkers, particularly those in the fields of psychology and comparative mythology, arguing against the nineteenth century’s intellectual placement of science over myth and the idea that rationality made myth irrelevant. Living amid the collective denial of myth, C. G. Jung (1875–1961), Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), Rollo May, James Hillman (1926–2011), John Moriarty (1938–2007), and others sought to reawaken Westerners’ appreciation of myth for its therapeutic, vitalizing properties. They believed rationalism’s widespread appeal since the Enlightenment had thrown the Western psyche off balance by showing mystery the back door.

Consider the following extract from the definition of ‘myth’ in Samuels’ A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis: “Myths are stories of archetypal encounters. […] Modern psychology […] must treat the products of unconscious fantasy, including mythological motifs, as statements of psyche about itself. We do not invent myths; we experience them” (CDJA 95). Not at all meant as a reference guide for the general reader, unlike the OED and Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, here myth is not equated with lies but respected as a force of human nature. Stories that behave mythically have a dynamism thought to possess a “compulsive hold” that, like feeling and emotion, is not chosen but experienced (CDJA 95). In “The Psychology of the Child Archetype” (1951), Jung, in his most concise definition of myth, wrote: “Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings, and anything but allegories of physical processes” (1940/1968, CW 9.I, 261). That idea of revelation is integral to analytical psychology, which holds myth as abetting mental and spiritual health. Bradbury was no Jungian, but he expressed a similar attitude often: “The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow” (“Day at Night”).

Hillman, a student of Jung’s who broke away to found the field of archetypal psychology in the nineteen-seventies, disagreed on this point with his own polycentric perspective. “For the archetypal school,” writes Michael Vannoy Adams, “there are no archetypes as such… There are only phenomena, or images, that may be archetypal” (Dawson and Young-Eisendrath 109). “This tenet of archetypal psychology,” says Hillman, “operates upon every mythic tale and figure, removing them from the realm of story only and pulling them down and in, showing how a myth precisely works in the psyche, in its habits of mind and heart” (Dream and the Underworld 24). For Hillman, those figures and presences that rise up from the unconscious in dreams, the imagination, and mythic narrative do not default to beneficence. Their mien can operate under every possible condition of life and beyond if we allow for metaphysics. The millennial Irish mystic John Moriarty is closer to Hillman in this respect: “I don’t go all the way with Jung. I don’t accept that life in harmony with these images is fullest life. I don’t accept that life in harmony with them is wisdom” (TGLT3 xliv). But the Jungian approach is not purely positive; Jung believed that a modern manifestation of the Germanic storm god Wotan had possessed the Nazis, destroying not only much of Europe but the Nazis themselves.²

Campbell is more optimistic in his appraisal of the potential for our relationship with unconscious contents:

Fantasy and imagination is a product of the body. The energies that bring forth the fantasies derive from the organs of the body. The organs of the body are the source of our life and of our intentions for life. And they conflict with each other. […] All of these different forces come into conflict within us and the function of mythological imagery is to harmonize them, coordinate the energies of our body, so that we will live a harmonious and fruitful life in accord with our society and with the new mystery that emerges with every human being, namely what are the possibilities of this particular human life?

(“Understanding Mythology with Joseph Campbell”)

This perspective gives myth a phenomenological basis, one arising from the body. The biological dimension of these hunches has been supported in recent years in scholarship showing them to be consilient with science today. Knox makes a compelling argument that the concept of the emergent mind “provides the key to our attempts to reconcile biology with psyche” (202), while John Ryan Haule describes today’s revisions and validations of Jungian thought as dependent upon a contemporary approach to myth: “A mythic perspective that is out of harmony with the world science describes cannot enchant the world. It can only ignore the world” (“Jung Today”). Literary scholar Loree Rackstraw, whose criticism courts quantum physics, agrees on embracing interdisciplinary consilience: “When we are in accord with these universal processes we, too, may recognize our sense of awareness as a sacred aspect of the universe” (“Quantum” 59).

Key to a post-Jungian approach is the recognition of myth as dynamic, as succinctly defined by Lucy Huskinson: “Myth is a story of human behavior, which is continually retold in line with the developing behaviou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 A post-Jungian mythodology for reading short stories
• PART I Kurt Vonnegut: A comedic Cassandra
• PART II Ray Bradbury: A polychromatic Pollyanna
• Epilogue: Golden apples of the monkey house
• Primary sources
• Secondary sources
• Index