Writing about war: Jung, Much Ado About Nothing, and the Troy novels of Lindsay Clarke

Arguably, in a time of war literature, and indeed all writing, is saturated with deep psychic responses to conflict. So that not only in literary genres such as epic and tragedy, but also in the novel and comedy, can writing about war be discerned. C.G. Jung, Shakespeare and Lindsay Clarke are fundamentally writers of war who share allied literary strategies. Moreover, they diagnose similar origins to the malaise of a culture tending to war in the neglect of aspects of the feminine that patriarchy prefers to ignore. In repressing or evading the dark feminine, cultures as dissimilar as ancient Greece, the 21st century, Shakespeare's England and Jung's Europe prevent the healing energies of the conjunctio of masculine and feminine from stabilising an increasingly fragile consciousness. In the Troy novels of Clarke, Answer to Job by Jung and Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare, some attempt at spiritual nourishment is made through the writing. [From the Publisher]

Venus infers

These poems mark the fault lines of myth, dream and memory, of a doubled identity emerging from the clash of war, desire and the cacophony of the city. 1974/Dead Sister , a narrative poem with a cast that includes Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Freud’s Dora, the Lady of Shalott, Ophelia, Esther, female cowboys and other deposed goddesses is ‘an autobiography’ of an imaginary dead twin. Alev Adil delineates the traces of a sense of displacement, but while the poems mark those frenetic uncertainties and erasures they celebrate the plenitude of new stories, epistemologies and possibilities born out of falling into fracture (the fracture of memory, gender, identity, culture) more than they mourn any loss. Venus Infers is haunted by the deities of ancient Greek myths and their contemporary manifestations. Eurydice is hiding out in Hackney, sometimes glimpsed on the Jubilee Line; Ariadne remembers her ancient palace as she prowls the endless corridors of a London hotel; Penelope still waits for peace in the ruins of Marash/Varosha. Cyprus often features in these poems, both as a landscape for myth and as a site for contemporary, and contested, memories. [From the Author]

Discourse and soul: Jung, literature, science and tragedy as mythical writing

This paper will propose that literature and science, far from being discrete spheres of cultural activity, are, in fact, the cultural expressions of interlocking myths. They therefore overlap and even take each other’s places, as examination of the ‘science’ of C.G. Jung and the ‘art’ of a writer such as John Cowper Powys, will show. ‘Dis-course’, I argue, is the material aspect of the mythical structuring of psychic experience. In the work of Jung and Powys, discourse is the articulation of the soul in the world that spans personal, social, natural and cosmic space. [From the Author]