In Praise of Shadows

Shadows are interesting things. Jung wrote about them; Ursula Le Guin put one in The Wizard of Earthsea. These are shadows as characters and presences, not absences; they are shadows as substance. Ged, in his wizardly battle with his nemesis Jasper, tries, against all the rules of magic, to raise the spirit of a dead queen, Elfarran. Unfortunately for him, hubristically opening the portal to the world of the dead releases something evil and unforeseen:

“Only for a moment did the spirit glimmer there. Then the sallow oval between Ged’s arms grew bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of the earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through that bright misshapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow, quick and hideous, and it leaped straight out at Ged’s face.’ [AWOE, ch 4]

The shadow scars Ged’s face with its talons, then escapes [Yes, J.K. Rowling ‘borrowed’ this idea and superimposed it on one Harry Potter]. Thereafter, the shadow turns and pursues Ged, assuming the form of Gebbeth — a creature that takes on the form of a human but is really an evil spirit in mortal guise. The novel shows that the hero can only defeat the shadow by turning to face it: by naming the thing that dogs his steps. Its name, of course, is his own.

In Jungian psychology, the human persona is itself a deception, as its Latin name makes clear. It is a ‘mask’ — an assumed physiognomy that acts as an interface between the ego and the outer world. The shadow is formed when the self projects an aspect of itself which it cannot accept. The ego then locates this shadow-self in others and loathes it as the enemy. To achieve the necessary boon of psychic healing, however, the hero or heroine must descend into the darkness of the underworld and there encounter the darkness of their own souls. In this Chthonic realm they meet monsters that wear their own face, for healing means accepting these demons as their own.

D H Lawrence explores this idea in Bavarian Gentians:

Reach me a gentian, give me a torch
let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower
down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness.
even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September
to the sightless realm where darkness was awake upon the dark
and Persephone herself is but a voice
or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark
of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,
among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on the
     lost bride and groom.

This process is what Jung called Nekyia, a descent to a deep realm of the psyche. Here the hero-self encounters an underworld of the dead where renewal comes in the creative embrace of darkness, the erotic seeding of the abyss with the spores of new life.

All great writing does this, and it gives us a clue to how we should live out the fictions of our own lives. We live in a world where no one apologises for anything. Few will own up to their own dark impulses, projecting their personal ‘evil’ onto others and thereby causing an illusory division between good and evil, pure and impure, us and them, the elect and reprobate. Few people now accept the idea of Original Sin: the notion that we are all craven, all broken and fallible, and lovable in our fallibility. And yet we are fallible: designed to fall and fail, tragic heroes all. We should accept the shadows murmur in own hearts, not pretend they are not there.

Once accepted, these plural darknesses, as Tanizaki explained in greta book In Praise of Shadows, can be enjoyed for their beauty and tenebrous charm.