61: The Mystical Relationship Between the Story and the Reader

61

The Mystical Relationship

Between the Story and the Reader

It doesn’t happen as often as when I’m taking a shower, or when I’m walking up the stairs to my writing room with my first or second cup of coffee, or anytime anywhere actually because the unpredictable spirit of inspiration has a mind of its own, but it happened the other morning when I was shaving: I caught a glimpse into the mystical relationship between the story and the reader, which was made memorable because I cut myself shaving for the first time in a long while, an insight that I have to explore in today’s spiritual musing because it goes to the very heart of the meaning and purpose of our existence…

As I reflected upon the mystical relationship between the story and the reader, the conversation that I had with my life partner Penny Lynn on the book she was reading over our morning coffee in my writing room came to mind, and as we talked about the effect that the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides was having upon her (she was more than half way through), she said: “It’s not giving me what I want to know,” and what she wanted to know was the mind of the hermaphrodite who was the narrator of the story.

It was all back story so far, and the story hadn’t told her what he/she thought and felt and how he/she was coping with being double-sexed; that’s why Penny wanted to read this novel. “Maybe the story will yet, but so far it hasn’t given me what I want to know.”

Last year Penny read Annabel by Kathleen Winter, which dealt with the same theme of a double-sexed person; but as engaging as the novel was, it still left her wanting. I suggested she read the highly praised novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, because it dealt with the same intersex theme; and I put it on my Amazon wish list and gave it to her for Christmas, but she was more than half way through and still reading the backstory which wasn’t satisfying her need to know; and that’s what prompted my insight into the mystical relationship between the story and the reader while I was shaving the other morning.

I wet my face with hot water and lathered it well with Gillette gel, and two or three strokes down the right side of my face where I always begin my shave, it came to me that it didn’t matter how well or ill-informed a reader was, their relationship with the story was unique to them alone because no two readers had the same relationship.

This epiphany was like a time bomb, because it didn’t explode into a euphoric insight until two strokes later; but because I had been reading Professor Harold Bloom’s Novelists and Novels, A Collection of Critical Essays—probably the western world’s most erudite critic who wrote in his preface, “I accept only three criteria for greatness in imaginative literature: aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, wisdom”—I had a bias for well-informed readers because I was led to believe that they would have a better understanding of the story than the less informed reader; but that didn’t matter: in one brilliant flash of insight it came to me that the story either satisfied a reader’s need to know or it didn’t, which my life partner Penny Lynn confirmed with her comments on Middlesex.

But by the time I finished shaving my now more-enlightened face, it came to me that the relationship between the story and the reader was much more profound than it first appeared; and this is what I’m exploring in today’s spiritual musing…

In the chapter called “The Dust on a Butterfly’s Wings” in my book The Pearl of Great Price, the true story of one’s man’s quest for the greatest treasure in the world, I gave expression to my understanding of story: “Stories bear the truth of the human condition, and the human condition is the story of our becoming; but not until we solve the riddle of our becoming will literature resolve the issue of the human condition.”

At the heart of every story can be found the mystery of the human condition, and writers write stories to get to the truth of our becoming—to get to the truth of life, to quote Alice Munro (“Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life,” said Alice Munro to Shelagh Rogers on CBC radio.) This is what keeps writers writing and readers reading, because we all want to know the meaning and purpose of our existence.

We write and read stories to satisfy our need to know, then; and the more satisfying a story is for a reader, the more it has satisfied their need to know. But as I “saw” while shaving the other morning, not every reader’s need to know is the same; which is why some stories appeal to some readers and not to others, as I learned from reviews of my own books.

Strangely enough however, we may not even know what we need to know because we are not always conscious of our needs; that’s why stories affect us differently, which makes the relationship of the story and the reader a mystical experience. But that’s because our needs are different, and this is the central mystery of the human condition that did not reveal itself to me until I read Laurens van der Post’s memoir Jung and the Story of Our Time.

Dr. Carl Gustav Jung was just a young medical graduate working at the Burgholzli Psychiatric Hospital in Zurich when he caught a glimpse of the central mystery of the human condition that I can verify with the story of my own quest for my true self that I wrote about in The Pearl of Great Price, and in the memoir of his friendship with C. G. Jung Laurens van der Post reveals what the young psychiatrist had discovered—

“Jung said that he learned from the start how in every disturbance of the personality, even in its most extreme psychotic form of schizophrenia, or dementia praecox as it was then called, one could discern the elements of a personal story. This was the personality’s most precious possession, whether it knew that or not, and the person could only be cured by a psychiatrist getting hold of the story. That was the secret key to unlock the door which barred reality in all its dimensions within and without from entering the personality and transforming it” (Jung and the Story of Our Time, Laurens van der Post, p. 119).

Jung told Laurens van der Post over one of their fireside chats when he visited him at his lakeside home in Kusnacht, Switzerland that he had come to the conclusion that every human being had a story, a myth of their own; and the purpose of man’s life was to live his own personal myth; but sometimes the story of one’s life can get interrupted by a breakdown, as he learned from his many patients at Burgholzli—from a traumatic loss, the betrayal of one’s spouse, the murder of one’s child, or whatever—and until one was re-connected with their personal story they would never be healed, which led to Jung’s discovery of the collective unconscious, the organizing principle of the archetypal Self, and his psychology of the individuation process that became the driving theme of his life’s work.

As coincidence would have it, I explored my insight into the mystical relationship between the story and the reader but had to put it aside because I could not see where it was taking me, and after dinner I “chanced” upon a movie on TV called The Soloist (starring Jamie Foxx as the musical prodigy Nathaniel Ayers and Robert Downey Jr. as the journalist Steve Lopez) that confirmed Jung’s insight that the interruption of one’s personal story kept them from becoming what they were meant to be. “As each plant grows from a seed and becomes in the end an oak tree, so man must become what he is meant to be. He ought to get there, but most get stuck,” said Jung, which was what happened to the musically gifted Nathaniel Ayres in The Soloist.

The central mystery of the human condition is one’s personal story, which is unique to every person because every person’s story is karmically self-scripted, and if one’s story is interrupted for one reason or another, as Nathaniel Ayres story was by his mental breakdown, one will never satisfy the longing in their soul to complete their story and become what they were meant to be; but this is such a deep mystery that only one who has been fortunate enough to become what they were meant to be can explain it, as Jung did with his life story that he shared with the world in his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

“The more uncertain I have felt about myself,” wrote Jung, “the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things. In fact, it seems to me as if that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected familiarity with myself.” And late in his life, a few days before he died, Jung had a dream that told him he had brought his own life story to happy resolution. In his dream he saw, “high up in a high place,” a boulder lit by the full sun. Carved into the illuminated boulder were the words “Take this as a sign of the wholeness you have achieved and the singleness you have become.”

Jung’s own life story was interrupted by his ambitious ego personality, which he paid a dear price to realize as he tells us in The Red Book, the chronicle of his  “confrontation with the unconscious” that was precipitated by his devastating break from his mentor and colleague Sigmund Freud: “At that time, in the fortieth year of my life, I had achieved everything that I had wished for myself. I had achieved honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and every human happiness. Then my desire for the increase of these trappings ceased, the desire ebbed from me and horror came over me…My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I have returned. I am here again…” wrote Jung, and thus began his heroic quest to find his lost soul by reconnecting with his life story, as valiant as any mythic quest for one’s true self can possibly be.

Like Carl Jung, I brought happy resolution to my own life story also, which I wrote about in The Pearl of Great Price; so I know that the central mystery of the human condition is to become what we are meant to be by staying connected with our own life story; but how can we stay connected with our life story? That’s the mystery.

“I could feel a lump of painful truth pushing at my heart,” wrote Alice Munro, expressing her need to write stories. That’s the truth that writers seek, and the key that readers need to unlock the mystery of what they are meant to be; but that’s another musing for another day, and I hope the reader can forgive me.

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