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which are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him
from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still
make up the groundwork of the human psyche." By engaging powers of
mind neglected in a utilitarian culture, Jung hopes to challenge the
very ground of our experience, to make possible a new and more valuable
mode of personal being.
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
charts a repre–
sentative destiny, and appropriately recalls certain romantic literary per–
formances: for the task of public self-transformation, of responding to
one's inward life in the name of "nature truly experienced" (Jung's
phrase) , was explicitly the lot of romantic poets, and a concern with
the legitimacy of the culturally accepted "rational" self has been a mark
of the literary imagination ever since.
By the standards of heroic autobiography, however, of personal testi–
mony to the cogency of a mode of experience,
Memories, Dreams, Re–
flections
is not an impressive performance; it will do little to bring an
unrest into our consciousness of being. I do not mean that Jung fails to
realize the disquieting beauty, the transformation of experience into the
stuff of a new art; that is the achievement of his romantic predecessors.
One need not demand of the visionary that he work out the conflict 'be–
tween his imaginative responses and cultural reality within the limits of
responsible form .
It
is his claim, after all, to be a significant phenomenon,
not necessarily an accomplished witness, and a good deal of the literature
of the past hundred and fifty years itself convinces us not by its precision
but by the daemonic quality of its experience. Such writing, however,
must remain free of cliche, of the accommodation between event and
expression that indicates a failure to confront one's history directly: its
lack of formal awareness must be complemented by an authentic sense
of the irreducibility of personal fact . Just here J ung arouses suspicion:
his manner, even in translation, is unfailingly and variously derivative,
a conglomerate of sonorous romanticisms and easy homilies, of meta–
physical borrowings and spiritual exhortations. One is continually dis–
concerted by a tendency to rhetorical bombast ("Like flames suddenly
flaring up, these thoughts darted through my mind"), by a substitution
of the language of melodrama for that of precise thought. ("Wherever
the psyche is set violently oscillating by a numerous experience, there is
a danger that the thread by which one hangs may be torn. Should that
happen, one man tumbles on to an absolute affirmation, another into an
equally absolute negation.") Jung's failure to either avoid the literary or
create a style of his own leaves the impression that Jung has never really
looked at his experience, that he has not permitted anything to work
upon him beyond the limits of the ordinary. One begins to suspect,
