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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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