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despite his testimony to the contrary, that J ung cannot release his grasp
of the commonplace, that he is incapable of risk, so immediately and
derivatively is the meaning of his available experience to him. J ung
emerges from his visionary experience to caution us that we must learn
to take the good with the bad, success with failure-how much more
interesting, how
human,
to be capable of mistakes! I would argue that
Jung's style-really his utter lack of it-is indicative of the movement
of his thought, which endlessly substitutes traditional moral categories
and hypostatized attitudes for the promised realities of visionary ex–
perience.
For an understanding of the clinical validity of Jung's position
there is nothing to be learned from this judgment; the vulgarity-if I
may call it that--of his conveyed experience, however, should give pause
to students of literature who have praised his theories because they seem
to support a kind of literary awareness. Ever since the romantic period,
a premise of literary thought has been that certain criticisms of society
can be made only through the agency of mental powers that operate
independently of rational thought. We may speak in this respect of a
tradition of visionary dissent, meaning by the phrase that currency of
opinion which values imaginative constructions because they express
losses and disaffections in modem life that reason cannot articulate.
It
is nQt too much to say that every major literary figure of the past cen–
tury has been involved, in one way or another, in some such assertion;
and yet it is equally true that the tradition still lacks an adequate aesthe–
tic, a theory that accounts for the primacy of the imagination without
insulting our sense of fact. Where Freud has been of no help, Jung has
offered to fill the gap, to bridge the distance between our literary ex–
perience and our other kinds of experience. Indeed, he has extended his
services to aesthetics quite openly, by distinguishing between the "psy–
chological" artist who raises the materials of ordinary experience
to
intensity, and the "visionary" artist who exploits critical powers that are
uniquely the property of art. For this reason, Jung's theories have re–
ceived currency outside professional circles chiefly at the instigation of
those concerned with literature. Yet it seems to me that any association
between
J
ung's theories and those of literary criticism can have only a
reactionary and cheapening effect upon the visionary enterprise. A
literary judgment of the memoirs of a professed scientist should not, of
course, influence the reception of his ideas; but the form of Jung's auto–
biography suggests that the caliber of his performance reflects the value
of his theories to literature.
