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Blue Horses

and

Illuminating the Shadow

(a novel manuscript and exegesis)

By Christine Bongers

B.Bus. (Comm) QIT, MBA Southern Cross University

Creative Writing and Cultural Studies Discipline

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

Submitted in fulfillment of Master of Arts (Research)

2008

Key Terms

Carl Gustav Jung, Shadow Archetype, Individuation, Collective Unconscious, Julia

Kristeva, Abject, Young Adult Literature, Creative writing, Thesis, Masters.

ii

Abstract

The novel manuscript Blue Horses focuses on a dusty corner of 1970’s Queensland

in this evocative tale of family, shadows that hang over from childhood and beauty

found in unexpected places. Its protagonist, Cecilia Maria, was named after saints

and martyrs to give her something to live up to. “Over my dead body,” she vows.

Her battles with a six-pack of brothers and the despised Kapernicke girls from the

farm next door teach her an unforgettable lesson that echoes down through the

years. Now she’s heading back to where it all began, with teenagers Jed and Jenna

reluctantly in tow. She plans to dance on a grave and track down some ghosts.

Instead she learns a new lesson at the gravesite of an old enemy.

The exegesis examines Jung’s concept of the Shadow Archetype as a catalyst

for individuation in writing for young adults. It discusses the need to re-vision

Jung’s work within a feminist framework and contrasts it to Julia Kristeva’s work

on the abject. Alyssa Brugman’s Walking Naked and Sonya Hartnett’s Sleeping

Dogs are analysed in relation to these concepts and lead into my own creative

reflections on, and justification for, use of the Shadow conceptual framework. In

following my shadow and establishing a creative dialogue between my conscious

intent and unconscious inspirations, I have discovered a writing self that is “other”

to the professional writer persona of my past.

iii

Table of Contents

Statement of Original Ownership v

Acknowledgements vi

Creative Work – a novel manuscript: Blue Horses 1

Exegesis - Illuminating the Shadow 252

Introduction 253

Part One: Literature Review 257

(i) Grappling with Shadows 257

(ii) Re-visioning Jung 260

(iii) Fangs & pimples & claws & all – Individuation & young adults 261

Part Two: Growing Up and Growing Wise 265

(i) Walking Naked by Alyssa Brugman 265

(ii) Sleeping Dogs by Sonya Hartnett 269

Part Three: Creative Reflection - The Heart of the Stone 272

Conclusions 281

Bibliography 284

iv

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis is my own and has not been previously submitted

to meet the requirements for any award at this or any other higher education

institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material

previously published or written by another person except where due reference is

made.

Signature: _________________________________

Christine Mary Bongers

Date: __________________________________

v

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to my supervisor Associate Professor Sharyn Pearce for her warm

support, my associate supervisor Dr Vivienne Muller for helping me negotiate

Kristevan theory, my QUT youth writing cohort for the peer critiques and to Peter

Bishop from Varuna for long-short-listing an early draft in the 2006 Varuna

Manuscript Development Awards.

Love and thanks to my husband Andrew for supporting and believing in me

always, and to Connor, Brydie, Clancy and Jake, for making our lives complete and

accepting the importance of my writing as work. To Mum for encouraging me to read

“brown paper if that was all I could get my hands on,” to my dear departed Dad for

setting me on this fictional journey and to my six brothers, whose younger selves

helped inspire the characters of Big Hairs, Punk, Wart, Fatlump, Lick and Cool Hand.

Special thanks to Mike for proof-reading; Tony, Peter, Rick and Tim for providing all

the details I had forgotten or never known about cars, farming and machinery in the

1970s (any errors are mine, not theirs); and to Jason for reminding me what a surly

teenager I was back then.

I am indebted to the late Lyle Semgreen of Jambin, for showing a much younger

me his prized “Blue Horse” thunder egg, which provided creative inspiration and my

manuscript’s title. While I have drawn heavily on the place and time of my childhood

to create this story, it is fiction: none of our lovely neighbours at Jambin bear any

resemblance to the Kapernickes and any other character’s resemblance to any person,

living or dead, is purely (or, in the great Jungian tradition of synchronicity, perhaps

meaningfully) coincidental. vi

Bongers Illuminating the Shadow

252

Illuminating the Shadow

An exegesis

by Christine Bongers


253

Introduction

The shadow stands on the threshold. We can let it bar the way to the creative

depths of the unconscious, or we can let it lead us to them.

Ursula Le Guin, The Child and the Shadow

As he lay dying, my father told me two things that seemed unrelated at the time.

The first was that I was the only one of his seven children to pay him back for the

car that he had helped each of us to buy. My reaction – ricocheting between outrage

and amusement - delighted the old stirrer. Then, amidst the grim tangle of tubes and

drips, bandages and blood, he gave me a final piece of advice: “You don’t want to

die without doing what you were meant to do, without being what you were meant

to be.”

His words raised questions I hadn’t considered in years and they still have

the power to make my chest ache. I had reached the chronological halfway point in

life. A busy career as a broadcast journalist, PR practitioner and lobbyist, had

segued into home-based work and children. I had been paid to write professionally

for most of my adult life, yet I rarely wrote creatively: I was afraid to expose the

limits of my talent to a more critical audience, which included myself. It seemed far

easier and safer, to hide behind the mask of my professional persona.


254

After my father’s death, fear of failure seemed nothing compared to the

cowardice implicit in a failure to even try. I began to write creatively, but without

any clear intent; with only a vague sense of wanting to recreate a time and a place

where my father was young and powerful and, of course, alive. It disturbed me that

I found him an elusive character to capture on the page, while a most insistent,

bolshy little voice kept writing itself into page after page. “Listen to your

characters,” counsels Venero Armanno (2007), “The ones that write themselves are

trying to tell you something.”

After a couple of false starts I discovered I wasn’t writing my Dad’s story; I

wasn’t even writing my own. The bolshy little character who became Cecilia Maria

or Sis for short, had her own story to tell: a story born of ignorance, trailing a

lingering regret. Her story was inspired by events surrounding a family who lived

briefly in the district in which I grew up and where Blue Horses is set. They dwelt

in the shadows of my childhood and I knew I had to go into the shadows to find

them, to give them fictional life.

I turned to the writings of the original Shadow Master, Carl Gustav Jung,

pioneer of Analytical Psychology. As a writer, I intuitively responded to his

concepts of the Shadow Archetype and the collective unconscious, finding they

informed not only my developing creative work, but also my writing process. Like

writer Ursula Le Guin (1979), I saw “embracing the Shadow” as a catalyst for

growing up and growing wise, not only for my young adult protagonist, but also for

myself as a writer. ‘Me and my shadow’ were keen to dance to Jung’s tune, but we

kept tripping over a generalized anxiety that Jung was out of step with the times. In


255

Part One of this dissertation, my Literature Review interrogates those concerns: has

Jung become old in our post-modern, post-structuralist world? How does feminism

come to terms with a theorist who preaches that we listen to the “Great Man

Within”? What can a theorist who concentrated on the second half of life offer to a

writer of Young Adult literature? And finally, why choose the Jungian Shadow

when Kristeva’s concept of the Abject covers some similar territory in

encompassing our experience of difference and other, but has garnered more critical

attention in analyses of young adult literature?

In Part Two, “Growing Up and Growing Wise,” I compare and contrast

Jungian and Kristevan analyses using two contemporary Australian novels: Walking

Naked by Alyssa Brugman and Sleeping Dogs by Sonya Hartnett. The former

demonstrates the use of the Shadow as a catalyst for individuation in young adult

fiction; the latter, while heavy in shadow imagery, does not. In Sleeping Dogs, the

abject rules, providing a meaningful contrast to both Walking Naked and my own

creative work and search for meaning as a writer.

Part Three, “The Heart of the Stone,” is a reflective examination of my

creative work and process, which provides the final justification for my use of a

Shadow framework. The interplay between my exegetical work and my creative

praxis is similar to what Jung (1916) termed “active imagination” and what

Madeline Sonik, writing in the Jung e-journal, called a “productive dialogue”

between conscious intent and the unconscious (2006 p 2).

I see my work as fitting into Haseman’s (2006) definition of Performative

Research, with my creative work Blue Horses and my exegesis Illuminating the


256

Shadow, “not only express[ing] the research, but in that expression, become[ing] the

research itself” ( p 5). The creative work is the star of the show and the exegesis, its

loyal servant, scurrying back and forth, meeting and often anticipating its mistress’

needs. An unexpected and pleasing outcome of this process has been seeing the

exegesis gradually emerge from the shadows, to stand proud, confident in its own

character, dignity and purpose in informing my creative process, to share this stage

with its mistress.


257

Part One - Literature Review

(i) Grappling with Shadows

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s

conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion

It takes a lot of courage to take the unconscious seriously and to tackle the

problems it raises.

M-L von Franz, The Process of Individuation

The Shadow runs like a current through the writings of Carl Gustav Jung,

enlivening the threshold between the conscious and unconscious. It encompasses

the dark unknown in all its manifestations: the “invisible saurian tail” of modern

man, “the sinister and frightful brother;” the “dark, inferior and undifferentiated part

of the personality …all those tendencies that run counter to the dominant cultural

canons of a given society,” as well as evil in all forms (cited in Connolly, 2003 p

413).

A century after Jung began to articulate his concept of the Shadow, it

continues to resonate with me as a person and as a writer. Now in that second half


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of life that so fascinated Jung, I find myself drawn to explore the very area rejected

in my youth as navel-gazing and self-indulgent: the dark continent of the Self. As

my writing developed, it demanded more than a familiarity with the surface terrain,

the peaks and valleys of lived experience; it needed to tap into the subterranean

roiling forces capable of vomiting up volcanic outbursts, compressing detritus into

diamond and forcing up ranges of behaviour unexpected in the placid landscape of

the everyday. It needed to turn inward to find explanations for life’s outward

manifestations.

Psychoanalysis provided trail-blazers in the exploration of the human

psyche: Sigmund Freud, who saw the personal unconscious as an underworld of

repressed desires; and Jung, his erstwhile student, for whom the unconscious was

infinitely richer - a vast resource with the potential to be friend, guide and adviser to

the conscious ego (Jung, 1964 p 12). The pair’s famous split, ostensibly over libido

as a driving force in life, now seems inevitable given the underlying differences in

their philosophical approaches to life (Jung, 2001 p 123).

Freud’s theoretical emphasis on the significance of the personal past was in

strong contrast to Jung’s future-oriented views (Kerr, 1988 p 23). Jung believed his

former mentor over-emphasized the pathological aspects of life and interpreted man

too exclusively in the light of his defects (2001 p 119). He saw human beings as not

just a function of their past, but as the engineers of their own destiny - if they could

get their conscious ego to listen to the unconscious and learn from it. He saw Freud

as spiritually stunted and believed that individuals in the modern world needed to

rediscover the life of the spirit: “It is the only way in which we can break the spell


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that binds us to the cycle of biological events” (2001 p 124). These words resound

with particular intensity in today’s grim botoxed reality, where the collective

consciousness prefers facial paralysis to laugh lines and fends off age with

sharpened scalpels and hypodermics filled with botulism toxicity.

Jung sought to untangle such complexities of the human psyche through the

Analytical Psychology that he founded. His exploration of the worlds of dreams,

art, literature, religion and philosophy led writer Ursula Le Guin to call him “the

psychologist whose ideas on art are the most meaningful to most artists” (1979 p

62). His enduring contributions include the concept of the collective unconscious

and its archetypes, which include the Shadow. The collective unconscious is “that

part of the psyche that retains and transmits the common psychological inheritance

of mankind” (Jung, 1964 p 107). In the snappier parlance of Wikipedia, it is the

“DNA of the human psyche” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytical_psychology,

13 May 2007). Jung saw the archetype as an “irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-

existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can

therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time” (1989 p 392).

For writers such as Le Guin, the collective unconscious provides a rich

respite from the lonely crowd of the collective consciousness; it is that place “where

we all meet … the source of true community; of felt religion; of art, grace,

spontaneity and love. How do we get there? ….Jung says the first step is to turn

around and follow your own shadow” (1979 p 63). Before I could do that, I had to

confront some uncomfortable realities arising from using a theorist who

philosophically genuflected to “the Great Man Within” (Jung, 1964 p 173). Like Le


260

Guin, I responded to him as an artist, but as a feminist, I had to interrogate anxieties

arising from the suspicion that Jung had become “old” in our post-structuralist,

post-modern world.

(ii) Re-visioning Jung

Post-Jungian writers such as Andrew Samuels (1985) have long recognized the

need to “correct” Jung’s “outmoded and unacceptable” attitudes to women, non-

whites and so-called “primitive” cultures. He argues that when this is done, one can

then appreciate Jung’s prescience regarding issues such as gender, race, nationalism

and cultural analysis, which have become the focus of psychological thought in the

decades following his death (cited in Baumlin, 2005 p 1). A common theme in the

literature is that in order to use Jung, one must accept the need to re-vision, re-read,

or even, according to one author, “intentionally misread” his theories: “[his] model

of the psyche … could be described as postmodern, a view of the self that

recognizes diversity and difference rather than unity and coherence … but Jung’s

work is not often read in this way” (Jensen, 2002 cited in Baumlin pp 1,2).

In her book Jungian Archetypes in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction

Lorelei Cederstrom argues that Jungian thought is both intuitive and symbolic and

as such is “particularly well-suited to describing the elements of literature, which

like dreams, resonate with a wealth of personal, cultural, religious and

psychological meaning” (2002 pp 4,5). However as a feminist, she has been

repeatedly challenged for using “such an outmoded and male oriented paradigm as


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Jungian theory to explore the female psyche” (p 2). Her book seeks to answer that

challenge, following in the wake of numerous feminist re-visions of Jungian

thought which began “by separating his theories from the masculinist biases of the

culture in which he was writing” and which are now contributing to an evolving

framework “within which feminists, Jungians and literary researchers can find a

common ground” (p 3). Cederstrom contends that Jung’s theory is flexible and open

to re-visions, quoting Jung himself: “The most we can do is to dream the myth

onwards and give it a modern dress” (1970 p 45). She believes that “the creative

imaginative universe of the woman novelist” is where Jung can be re-visioned to

more accurately depict women’s experience and “dream the myths of women

forward” (p 5). In examining key works of adult literature by prominent women

writers such as Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, Cederstrom

finds that the Shadow plays a strong role in all phases of a woman’s life (p 33) but

like Jung, she had little to say about the adolescent phase.

(iii) Fangs & Pimples & claws & all - Individuation and young adults

[The normal adolescent] sees his shadow as much blacker, more

wholly evil, than it is. The only way for a youngster to get past the

paralyzing self-blame and self-disgust of this stage is really to look

at that shadow, to face it, warts and fangs and pimples and claws

and all – to accept it as himself – as part of himself. The ugliest

part, but not the weakest. For the shadow is the guide. …of the

journey to self-knowledge, to adulthood. (Le Guin, The Child and

the Shadow, 1979 p 65)


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Jung believed that the ego’s first encounter with the shadow during

adolescence kick-started the process of individuation, or psychological maturation.

People could only become happy, whole and productive when that process was

complete and “the conscious and the unconscious have learned to live at peace and

to complement one another” (1964 p 14). However, Jung, like Cederstrom’s

favoured writers, was far more interested in what happened in middle age, when the

shadow had become “blacker and denser” after inferior and incompatible elements

of the psyche had been ignored and repressed for decades (1938 p 131).

As a writer of young adult fiction, I wanted to explore that first encounter

with the Shadow: the point at which the egocentricities of childhood come up hard

against a developing awareness of self and other. I believe, as does Ursula Le Guin,

that this landscape of youth provides fertile soil in which the Shadow can take root

and grow. However, we part company on the issue of how this can be explored

through genre-based literature. Le Guin sees Fantasy as the “appropriate” language

in which to tell stories about evil to young people; realistic fiction, she says, is “the

very hardest media in which to do it.” She argues this is because evil is not a

problem with a solution, but at the same time, she believes it would be unethical to

present the child with evil as an insoluble problem: “What then,” she asks “is the

naturalistic writer for children to do?” (p 69-70)

My response is that naturalistic writers for young adults can utilize the

Shadow because it is such a richly nuanced, multi-dimensional concept, not a

reductionist one found only at the wrong end of a good-evil spectrum. The Shadow

encompasses a rich conceptual framework for realistic young adult fiction wherein


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hidden aspects of the personal and collective unconscious can be revealed through

dreams, fantasies or personal relationships – it does not need to be reduced to a

battle between good and evil.

The Shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge

about himself and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or

indirectly – for instance, inferior traits of character and other incompatible

tendencies… The shadow behaves compensatorily to consciousness; hence

its effects can be positive as well as negative. (Jung, 1989 p 399)

The Shadow not only encompasses “other,” with all the conflicts and

ambiguities that attract, repel and confront the normal adolescent, it also acts as the

catalyst that initiates what Jung calls individuation: that coming to terms with a

fuller understanding of Self that is part of growing up and growing wise.

In following my shadow, I depart from recent scholarship in the area of

literary criticism and young adult fiction, which has drawn heavily on

psychoanalysis and Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection (Kidd, 2004 p 109; Wilkie-

Stibbs, 2006). For Kristeva, the abject is “what disturbs identity, system, order.

What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the

composite …The jettisoned object that is radically excluded, which draws towards

the place where meaning collapses” [my italics] (1982 cited in Connolly p 415). By

way of contrast, I explore in my writing a place where meaning coalesces for my

adolescent protagonist - in her encounter with the Shadow, where the conscious and

unconscious collide - providing a catalyst for greater self-knowledge and personal

growth in her journey towards a more fully-realized Self.


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Connolly captures a key difference between the shadow and the abject in her

exploration of the differing theoretical approaches of Freud, Kristeva and Jung in

relation to terror, concluding that abjection is essentially linked to the conservative

manoeuvre of closure. She contends that “the ritual contact with abjection and the

subsequent collapse of boundaries that separate self and other is temporary and its

function is the final and more radical exclusion of the other and the strengthening of

boundaries and the symbolic order” (2003 p 415). She compares this with Jungian

thought that sees in the encounter with the Shadow the “possibility of widening the

boundaries of ego consciousness and of integration of ‘otherness’” (p 407). Rather

than excluding the other, it can learn from otherness and incorporate it into a more

fully realized concept of Self.

Kristeva does not discount learning from the abject, calling it “that which

must be driven away and that which is cast out; but challenges from its place of

banishment and does not cease to challenge its master” (Kristeva, 1982 p 70). This

symbolic shadowing of the abject continued to challenge me as a writer, as I

reflected on and applied shadow and abject concepts to case studies from young

adult literature.


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Part Two - Growing up and Growing Wise

(i) Walking Naked by Alyssa Brugman

There are those that are popular.

There are those that are outcasts.

And there are those who must choose between the two.

(http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385731157)

Walking Naked was an Honour Book for Older Readers in the CBCA Book of the

Year Awards in 2003 and was short-listed for the Victorian Premier’s Literary

Award for Young Adult fiction in the same year. I found it an instructive example

of how the Jungian concept of the Shadow can be a powerful catalyst for

individuation in realistic young adult literature.

Fifteen year old Megan Tew, is part of “The Group,” the smug, popular set at

school that carries out “Interventions” on its own members if they fail to conform to

the group’s exacting standards. Megan is the group’s power broker and co-founder,

along with Candice, her best friend since kindergarten. Candice is the beauty;


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Megan, the brains and their careful recruitment strategies ensure neither is ousted

from their privileged positions astride the unruly animal that is high school politics.

Megan’s Machiavellian tendencies plant the seed for revolt within the ranks,

however, she is clever enough to contain any dissent, until she ends up side-lined

from her power base, in lunch-time detention with the school outcast, Perdita.

The Group projects its own nastiness and fear of difference onto Perdita,

labelling her “the Freak” and vilifying her by hearsay: “She said weird things,

sometimes in Old English …I heard she was part of a cult … a witch … I heard that

she smelt … she didn’t wash or brush her hair and that once someone had seen a

tiny cockroach scuttle down behind her left ear…” (Brugman, 2002 p 8).

Perdita is a difficult, spiky personality, at odds with high school and

everyone in it. Her only real companion in life is poetry because it proves she’s not

completely alone in the world: everything she feels, someone has felt before ( pp

81-82). In detention, Megan discovers the Freak is freakishly smart, gifted in fact.

Perdita reaches out to her, and as Megan’s position in the group erodes, a

surreptitious relationship, not quite a friendship, develops between the two. At

Megan’s insistence, it is forced to exist in the shadows, away from the lonely crowd

of the group’s collective consciousness: “I explained to Perdita that I couldn’t see

her at school…. My position in the group made it impossible” (p 77).

Megan gets glimpses into the Freak’s life, lived in the shadow of a violent

home life and the cruelty of her classmates. Her understanding of other is expanded

as she is attracted by Perdita’s overweening intelligence, their truant excursions to

University and the broader intellectual experience on offer. At the same time, she is


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repelled and at times, frightened by Perdita’s difference, by the strangeness in her

eyes: “They looked like the eyes of a dog that is biting you in play, but any moment

now is going to bite you for real” (p 135). When Megan is forced to choose between

Perdita and The Group, her decision precipitates a devastating encounter with the

Shadow, from which she eventually finds meaning and a way to recover and to

grow up, out of the shadow of group conformity, into a more fully realized human

being.

According to Le Guin, the weak ego, or one that is “offered nothing better,”

identifies with the collective consciousness which she defines as “all the little egos

added together, the mass mind, which consists of such things as cults, creeds, fads,

fashions, status-seeking, … popcult, all the isms, all the ideologies, all the hollow

forms of communication and “togetherness” that lack real communion or real

sharing” ( p 63). This is where Megan begins her journey. Isolated in detention,

excluded from the group’s inner sanctum, exposed to revelations about Perdita’s

intellect and personality, she literally turns away from the collective consciousness

represented by the group and follows her Shadow, personified by the subversive

Perdita, into a locked library and on truant excursions to the University. For Megan,

it is a doorway into the collective unconscious, where she begins to explore beyond

the boundaries of her privileged self-absorption, discovering poetry and the

possibility of a genuine intellectual life.

According to Von Franz it is our own actions which dictate whether the

shadow becomes our friend or enemy: “the shadow becomes hostile only when it is

ignored or misunderstood” (von Franz, 1964 p 173). Megan’s lack of commitment


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to the relationship precipitates a frightening confrontation when Perdita refuses to

be banished back to the shadows. She parades her relationship with Megan,

triggering an Intervention by the Group. Forced to choose, Megan betrays Perdita’s

trust and sells her soul to the Group: “I knew right at that moment that if I could roll

back my life by thirty seconds I would do it differently” (Brugman, 2002 p 154).

Megan learns about grief and regret in the shattering climax to the novel.

She finally breaks away from the claustrophobic confines of the Group and attempts

to atone by organizing poetry nights as a symbolic way of honouring Perdita and

what she has learned from her. Megan is sadder and wiser at the novel’s end: “I

think she gave up on the world, and gave up on me, too soon. The thing that

disappoints me is that Perdita was not around to see that I too have learned the

enterprise in walking naked” (p 171).

In embracing the Shadow and “walking naked” without the protection of her

carefully cultivated group mask, Megan has transcended the limitations of her

former persona and grown into a more fully realized version of her true Self. It

could be argued that Perdita on the other hand, occupies a place of abjection after

facing “a hatred that smiles” and “a friend who stabs you” (Chanter, 2000 p 144);

she is what Kristeva argues is driven away “but challenges from its place of

banishment and does not cease to challenge its master” (1982 p 70). Perhaps this is

where the abject fails for me on a personal level: “Perdita was the most

uncompromising person I have ever met … It’s also the quality that made her

choose to die” (Brugman, 2002 p 171). Perdita’s refusal to embrace her own

shadow, to accept the dark truths about her own persona, meant that instead of


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reaching for that chance to grow as a person, she chose obliteration. This erasure of

the identity of the subject engulfed by abjection (Wilson 2001) is something I wish

to discuss further in relation to Sleeping Dogs and as a point of departure in my own

creative work.

(ii) Sleeping Dogs by Sonya Hartnett

This 1996 winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for Young Adult

fiction lends itself to comparative readings using the shadow and the abject, which I

found helpful in delineating my own conceptual framework.

Griffin Willow is a violent, domineering, alcoholic father of five grown

and half-grown children. He rules his isolated, dysfunctional family in rural

Australia, grubbing out a living from farming and a campground that no-one ever

visits twice. Griffin exemplifies just how black and dense a shadow can become

if ignored and repressed for a lifetime, grinding his wife into psychological

withdrawal and projecting his own shadow onto his sensitive and talented son,

Jordan, who he beats regularly and relentlessly - “Look at his brothers and sisters

– is this child mine?” - justifying the violence by objectifying its victim: “If he’s

mine I can do as I like with him” (Hartnett, 1995p 12).

The entire family is dark, literally and metaphorically: “The Willows have

black hair, all except Jordan, who is yellow as corn, and their fair, graying mother”

(Hartnett, 1995 p 11-12). Grace’s withdrawal to a “quiet, dim place that she found

greatly to her liking” ( p 15), allows her children to degenerate into a ragged pack,


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uncared for and undefended, as wary of outsiders as it is oddly loyal to the vicious

top dog, Griffin.

One could be tempted to bring a Jungian analysis to this book with the

cataclysmic arrival of the itinerant artist called Fox. He is the Jungian Trickster

archetype who plays “malicious jokes on people, only to fall victim in his turn to

the vengeance of those whom he had injured.” (Jung, 2003 p 160 para 457). Fox

enjoys stirring the pot: “He understands the value of his knowledge. This nasty,

narrow family needs a shaking” (Hartnett, 1995 p 85). His meddling in the family’s

dark and incestuous secrets unleashes a terrifying and humiliating attack from the

Willow pack. His malicious counter-strike is aimed at the family, but takes out only

one member: Jordan, who dies not knowing the one he loved best betrayed him. For

me, this novel is all about abjection, particularly in its portrayal of Jordan: the one

who disturbs the order of the family, doesn’t respect boundaries, sleeps with his

sister and becomes “the jettisoned object, the radically excluded” (Kristeva, 1982 p

2), shot down like a dog by his own father. The rest of the pack stays loyal,

concealing the crime and slinking away from the scene forever.

Kim Wilson’s analysis of abjection in three contemporary Australian young

adult novels supports the view that “the identity of the subject engulfed by abjection

will ultimately be erased” (2001 p 29-30). Sleeping Dogs fits into this conceptual

framework with fair Jordan finally expunged; closure for the Willow family, a final

and radical exclusion of “other” leading to a strengthening of boundaries and the

symbolic order of this dark and disturbing family. For me, the entire family is

engulfed by abjection and they prove it by disappearing at the novel’s end, erasing


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themselves from the scene of their crimes. They become “the jettisoned object that

is radically excluded, which draws towards the place where meaning collapses”

(Kristeva, 1982 p 2); a place where incest is somehow innocent, revelation begets

betrayal, ignorance and brutality triumph and evil escapes unpunished.

In many respects Sleeping Dogs is the antithesis to my own creative work:

the shadow side to the rural family I have created in Blue Horses. There is no

growing old for Jordan, as there is for Janeen and Aileen, no growing wise for any

of the characters from Bonaparte’s Farm, not even the meddlesome Bow Fox, who

at the novel’s end, escapes their dark and claustrophobic world ignorant of the death

he has precipitated: “And Bow actually smiles to remember the Willow family: he

is gracious enough to wish them luck” (Hartnett, 1995 p 130).

The abject in Sleeping Dogs continues to challenge long after the story ends,

despite, or perhaps because there is no promise of light shining at the end of this

dark tale. I respond as a reader to the abject, but as a writer, the Shadow conceptual

framework continues to resonate more clearly with my own creative work. Implicit

in the shadow is the existence of illumination and like the light at the end of Glenda

Simpson’s Dunhill, it calls to me and I follow.


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Part Three - Creative Reflection: The Heart of the Stone

…the unconscious surrounds us. It infuses what we think we know with

secrets and mysteries. Whether it is goal of our research, it is always the

secret companion of it. (Rowland, 2007 p 1)

I do not write because I must. I write because I can.

It started out as fun and games and almost ended in tears. The countless blue-

and-pink-lined exercise books filled with endless stories and decorated with daisies,

mutated over the years into clever essays written for the graded applause of teachers

and then into work, marked by advancement in salary and position, until my words

were no longer my own. They appeared in newspapers under other journalists’ by-

lines; in documents signed off by senior officers; on television and radio, being

mouthed by clients, while I, the invisible ventriloquist, kept to the shadows and

banked my fees. I became so alienated from the products of my own labour, that I

was relieved when the words disappeared completely, lost to the heady biscuity

delights of babies, gap-toothed smiles and happy husband pie, reappearing for

special cameo appearances at exclusive functions and consultancies, the odd

wedding, and finally, a funeral.


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Don’t die without doing what you were meant to do. Without being what you

were meant to be...

The words echoed in my head in the months after my father died. They

filled me with fear because they asked me to start thinking again, to strip off the

professional mask and dare to walk naked, baring whatever lay within. I dreamed of

releasing a writer, someone with her own words, her own voice, but dreaded

discovering the blank face of a cipher. Age brings the consolation of experience: I

knew fears multiplied when left to fester, so I reached out a tentative hand, lifted the

mask of my adult persona and found myself back at the beginning...

The journey

I chose a notebook festooned in tulips, the flower of my father’s homeland: free of

association with the computer-driven world of media releases and corporate PR;

redolent of the stories I so loved writing as a child. I went back into my own past in

an attempt to discover the lost voice that had come so effortlessly in my youth. Not

knowing where to start, I groped at the rough rock of my childhood, turning it over

and over in mind, trying to write my way into its heart.

At a conscious level I was trying to apply the skills I had to a new form.

Like a middle-aged stonemason contemplating an apprenticeship in sculpture, I

knew I had to free the figure in the stone, so I grabbed my tools and started

hammering away. I had a feeling for the raw material, a basic toolkit and a bit of

on-the-job training, but I had never attempted to create anything so fine, and


274

perhaps, most tellingly, I lacked any sense of a clear artistic vision. I was used to

working with templates or whacking together ephemera under deadline pressure.

Creating something infinitely more complex quickly depleted old skills and forced

me to develop what latent talents I had. I just kept hammering away until I had

exhausted all that I knew, then stepped back to view the product of my labour of

love. My first-born novel creation. My baby.

Like all new mothers, I was blinded by love, marveling at all those working

parts, oblivious to any imperfections. I was happy in my now computerized nest,

rhapsodizing over baby in 12 pt: Times New Roman or Arial? It looks great in both!

I tried to ignore the shadow flickering across the surface of my happiness, the

recurrent stab of fear at the thought of exposing my baby to the stares of others. I

dreaded the thought that I’d given birth to an FLK: funny looking kids belonged to

other people; I couldn’t bear to think that I might have one too. Denial works for

only so long and the shadow was persistent, so I decided to give someone who

knew about babies a quick peek and see what they thought. I chose Linda Carroll

from Harper Collins for an editorial consultancy at the Queensland Writer’s Centre.

She beamed and urged me to enter Harper Collins’ very own baby show – the

Varuna Manuscript Development Awards. I was elated, but a little conflicted: after

all I’d only shown her the perfect little face, the adorable profile; I hadn’t told her

my baby was nearly two years old and still couldn’t stand on its own two feet. But I

did what new mothers do, repressed the fear and fussed about, primping and

preening my baby, before sending it off with whispered reassurances: “Don’t worry

if you don’t win, Mummy still loves you!”


275

My baby came home with a ribbon: short-listed along with more than a

dozen others in the 2006 Varuna Manuscript Awards. It didn’t win. The experience

filled me with hope and despair and fueled a growing private conviction that there

really was something wrong with my beautiful baby.

I sent it off to the specialists, Driftwood Manuscript Appraisal, for a drawn-

out diagnosis that confirmed my worst fears: “This assessment will probably strike

the author as rather harsh, but ….” The anonymous nine page assessment listed in

excruciating detail my failings as a mother and concluded that my baby could not

possibly survive without major surgery:

I found the story of Janeen and her sister quite moving, but coming far too

late in its exposition to have much impact, and I can see how if the writer re-

thinks the manuscript and puts this story at the core of her narrative, and its

subsequent effects on her main character, then her next draft will take great

leaps forward as a piece of engaging fiction for older adolescent readers

(Driftwood Manuscript Assessment 2006 p 9).

I cried. Not out of grief, for my poor twisted baby, but out of pity for myself.

Did I have the strength, the will, to start again? To rethink my protagonist, my

narrative? To junk an 80,000-word manuscript that had taken me three part-time

years to write? The answer was obvious before the tears had even dried: I was a

mother; I would do whatever was necessary to make my baby whole and launch it

into the world.

*


276

Venero Armanno (2006) writes of a young builder proudly showing off the glass

brick wall he’d built in Veny’s bathroom. It looked beautiful, but if you leant on it,

everything came crashing down. An older professional pointed out where he’d gone

wrong and explained how to fix it, then left the young builder to take it apart, brick

by brick and start again, from scratch. “He didn’t complain, but he did learn a great

deal” ( p 16).

I too have learnt a great deal since devoting 2007 to dismantling that first

draft and rewriting it from scratch. The MA cohort in Youth Writing at QUT taught

me to think critically about what I was doing and why. The Queensland Writers

Centre’s 2007 Year of the Novel with Venero Armanno taught me just about

everything else I should have known (and didn’t) before setting out on this fictional

journey. The synergies helped shape my creative work at a conscious level.

Ironically, much of that conscious intent grew out of two months I spent

away from the creative work, struggling in the murky waters of literary theory and

attempting to define my conceptual framework. Academic immersion almost ended

in a drowning, before I surfaced, spluttering, with a Jungian lifeline gripped in my

hand. It was an intriguing choice - there is little of the mystic in my character - but I

couldn’t ignore the fact that the Shadow concept resonated so clearly my ears were

ringing.

The story that became Blue Horses found me the moment I typed the words:

“Sis, you’ve got Aileen Kapernicke’s germs!” It brought back with stunning clarity

the shadow of a lonely child in the playground, the outcast, the “other” onto whom

in our ruthless innocence we projected our own dark and frightful fears: “They had


277

fat sandwiches for lunch. Hardly any meat on them at all. Just fat. And Aileen kills

flies-”

Recognise it? We all do. I have not yet met a single individual who could

not tell me the full name, christian name and surname - of that archetypal child,

lonely and despised, who inhabited the landscape of their youth. They are

unforgettable because they personify our fears about everything we don’t want to be

and because later, too late to make a difference, we can see from the lofty heights of

adulthood, how we in our innocence and ignorance betrayed them, sometimes by

our actions, more often by simple inaction: sins of omission rather than

commission.

I initially saw the Shadow concept as a convenient “way in” to explaining

the relationship between my protagonist and antagonist, the visceral dislike that

feeds much of my plot conflict: rather than facing her own shortcomings, Cecilia

projects them onto the Kapernicke girls. I saw potential in developing their

relationship along the lines suggested by von Franz: “the function of the shadow is

to represent the opposite side of the ego and to embody just those qualities that one

dislikes most in other people.”(1964 p 173) I believed that Jung intuitively

understood what was needed to develop a “rounded” character – in fiction, as in

life: “we have a body, which, like all bodies, casts a shadow …if we deny this body,

we cease to be three-dimensional and become flat and without substance” (1992 p

30). With the bulk of my manuscript set in rural Queensland in the 1970s, at a time

when child abuse was a societal blind spot and casual violence against children

often passed without comment, I saw applications for personal and collective


278

aspects of the Shadow to add layers of meaning to plot, conflict development and

setting. I was particularly interested in exploring Le Guin’s proposition that

adolescent battles can play an important part in defining oneself as an adult: “So

that, when he grows up into his strength and responsibility as an adult in society, he

will be less inclined, perhaps, either to give up in despair or to deny what he sees,

when he must face the evil that is done in the world”(1979 p 70). Le Guin, like

Jung, assumed the masculine. In using adolescent females as protagonist and

antagonist, I deliberately wanted to challenge that male assumption and use the

Shadow in young adult fiction aimed at young women, thereby contributing to an

evolving post-Jungian framework that better depicts female reality and experience.

I had it all planned and was therefore unprepared for the most potent and

unexpected outcome of my engagement with the literature. I found it informed not

only the writing of my manuscript, but also my development as a writer and an

individual. I was forced to confront my own shadow, which encompassed the

stunted, repressed “navel-gazing” that I had been so impatient with in my youth. As

I grew more thoughtful, my characters took on greater depth, showing a capacity for

introspection that had been quite foreign to me in the past. Writers are necessarily

limited by their own understanding of human nature: I felt that understanding

expanding with my research, and with it, my writing horizons.

Tessa Adams and Andrea Duncan (2003) in their book The Feminine Case –

Jung, Aesthetics and Creative Process consider creative process as “a

phenomenological and aesthetic engagement with the unconscious” (p1). Duncan

contends that women “have found through their own creativity an approach to


279

individuation which is authentic and in many ways as “other” to themselves” (p

148). I too have grown through my writing and through what I think of as the

creative dance between the conscious and unconscious parts of my psyche.

Madeline Sonik (2006), writing in Jung: the e-journal, describes how she

has used the Shadow in not only the production of works of fiction, but in

developing a creative relationship between ego intent and the unconscious. She

points out that in the production of literary works, writing does not issue from the

ego alone: the unconscious plays an important role, albeit an under-rated one in

many creative writing classes ( p 2). I have discovered it is no easy task to learn

what Sonik calls allowing “ego consciousness to engage in a productive dialogue

with the unconscious” (p2). It can be kick-started by the “loose construing” that

writer Libby Hathorn advocates for clearing the debris of writer’s block (QUT

Youth Writing Workshop 2007). However it involves a deeper engagement with,

and honest appraisal of, motivations and needs, in order to enrich one’s writing by

developing conscious ways of recognizing and delivering unconscious contents. I

have learnt to trust my creative instincts when it comes to problem solving,

consciously stirring the bubbling brew of the unconscious, then leaving it to stew

for as long as it takes, trusting that the solution will float to the surface eventually.

Jung (1916) in his essay The Transcendent Function called this “active

imagination” whereby a creative dialogue opens between the conscious and

unconscious “in which now one side takes the lead, now the other (paras. 181ff),

until a “third thing” is formed that represents a union of the two parts (para. 189).


280

This is the transcendent function, which “manifests itself as a quality of conjoined

opposites”(cited in Stein, 2005 p 11).

In confronting shadow aspects of my own personality, I have found a

writing self that is “other,” which transcends the limitations of the professional

persona I had adopted in the past. Jung argues that the “other may be just as one-

sided in one way as the ego is in another. And yet the conflict between them may

give rise to truth and meaning – but only if the ego is willing to grant the other its

rightful personality” (1940 p 237).

Like other writers using Jungian or post-Jungian frameworks, I have

discovered synchronicities that enrich my understanding, and enjoyment of my

own writing. Early in my manuscript’s development, I was inspired by a Central

Queensland rock hound’s famous find: an ordinary stone that when cut and

polished revealed a stunning image of a galloping blue horse at its heart. I saw

this as a metaphor for the hidden beauty and meaning that can be found in the

most unlikely place or, person, relationship or life. My exegetical research

subsequently revealed that the stone is the highest and most enduring symbol of

the true Self (Jung, 1964 p 208-09). While I had been busily polishing the rough

rock of my childhood so that I could show its hidden shining face to the world, I

didn’t understand on a conscious level that I was trying to write my way into my

own heart. My creative work is called Blue Horses because it comes from the

heart of the stone, the depths of my true self, and symbolizes the beauty and

meaning at the heart of both my creative piece and exegesis.


281

Conclusions

Creative people fall into an area of themselves that is not part of the

knowable conscious Self.

David Malouf, Brisbane Writer’s Festival, 2007

My investigation into the use of the Shadow Archetype in writing young adult

literature involved a twelve-month spiral of writing, researching, reflection,

critique, feedback and rewriting. That period taught me that the conscious ego

provides intent and control in structuring the story and reining in unruly story

elements. However, it does not produce the magic; that comes from the

unconscious.

Creative writing is a numinous blend of craft (the conscious shaping of

language and story) and art (the harnessing of unconscious contents, pointing them

in the right direction and letting them have their head). A wild creative ride often

takes my story somewhere I had not intended to go. Sometimes it is a pointless

detour that at least serves to contribute to my mental map of places to avoid in the

future. Other times it takes the story to a breathtaking place that is so perfect I


282

would have chosen it myself had I only “known” in a conscious way, that it was

there.

I am learning to listen to my unconscious and trust my writing instincts, the

intuitive feel for the rhythm of language and story, knowing that the resolution will

come to me, eventually. Critical feedback has played an important part in my

learning process with an independent appraisal on a first draft, most useful on

structure and intent, and peer critiquing most useful at the micro-level during the re-

write process.

Any writing process is idiosyncratic: mine is not unlike doing a 50,000 piece

jigsaw puzzle, just harder. There is no template to go by, only a shifting internal

vision. All the pieces are there, either on the surface or just below it; I have to find

them and put them together in a way that works for me, trusting in my ability to

produce a meaningful vision by the end. Clarity develops with the work: any artistic

vision missing in the mad scramble for a first draft, comes together like iron filings

drawn to some mysterious magnetic design, during the re-writing process.

I write most days while my children are at school, the constant practice

improving my ear for the rhythm of language and story. I hear the plink, plink,

plink, of the words as they fall onto the page; listening for that false note that might

take a reader out of the world I am creating. I have become both more sensitive as a

writer, achieving that distance that allows me to know when something isn’t

working, and more resilient, less personally wounded by criticism. I have come to

thank that anonymous 2006 assessor from Driftwood for her admittedly harsh but

fair analysis. Nietzsche was right: anything that doesn’t kill you makes you


283

stronger. I have become stronger, more resilient and determined. I am not deterred

by Veny Armanno (2007) saying he wrote a million words before his first novel

was published, or by the expert studies that quote 10,000 hours or 10 years of

maximal effort and deliberate practice to master a skill (Ericsson, 1993). Hours

spent in the flow pass quickly: these days a shadow at my back startles me; I stare

uncomprehendingly at little figures in uniform wondering what they are doing there

– “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you at school?” The answer is always the same. It’s

3 o’clock. I’ve missed lunch. Again.

*

The final piece of the jigsaw is now in place. I understand what my father tried to

tell me about myself before he died. It took me four years to pay him back for the

1985 Diahatsu Charade he helped me to buy. It took me even longer to finish this,

my first novel manuscript. As I type these last words, I thank him for prodding me

into exploring my latent talents and for reminding me what a determined little cuss I

have always been: I finish what I start and I always pay my debts. For more than 30

years I have owed something to a memory of two little girls in a dusty playground:

one clutching a daisy-covered notebook filled with stories, the other, a shadowy

figure, standing alone, at the edge of the play. That long-standing debt has now

been repaid.


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