Jung’s Red Book, improvisation, and the mētic spirit

ABSTRACT

Understanding The Red Book as an improvisation and Jung as an improviser offers a new approach to understanding the active imagination and the analytic method that emerged from it. Such an approach uncovers the mētic spirit – the spirit of polytropic intelligence – that informs The Red Book and the archetypal figure of Hermes/Mercurius/Trickster that informs all improvisations and will come to dominate Jung’s career. The rhetoric of improvisation in The Red Book conveys that, uncontaminated by the directed consciousness or ego, personae and imagoes arise spontaneously from his unconscious and control him, not he them. Such gestures privilege non-rational ways of making art and knowing the self and world, part and parcel of the paradigm shift that characterizes the 20th century. Jung’s Red Book is on the leading edge of that effort to shift from objective rationality to a rationality that can embrace subjective elements: the unconscious and the irrational, not just the “broad highways” but also the “back alleys” of human experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Jung
• improvisation
• active imagination
• analytic method
• Mētis
• Thēmis
• Odysseus
• Achilles
• Hermes
• Hillman
• Mill
• naturalism
• The Red Book
• Shamdasani
• spontaneity
• Trickster
• hero
• Siegfried
• polytropos
• Nagy

If one opens up chaos, magic also arises … . One cannot say what the effect of magic will be, since no one can know in advance because the magical is lawless, which occurs without rules and by chance so to speak.

—C.G. Jung, The Red Book

These are days when no one should rely unduly on his ‘competence.’ Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

—Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street (2016)

The technique of active imagination Jung developed in writing The Red Book is a form of improvisation. Responding to creative fantasies that arise unbidden from the unconscious, Jung engages personae in free-flowing dialogue. Rather than interpret such images and events by deploying the intellect, what Jung would call the directed consciousness or ego, active imagination allows them to develop or amplify sui sponte, of their own accord. ‘Stick with the image’, was Jung’s mantra inviting free association and forestalling conscious interpretation.

Just as Sonu Shamdasani’s introduction to The Red Book situates Jung’s work in its ‘cultural moment’ of Dadaists, Surrealists, and other Modernists (Jung, 2009, p. 194), so too understanding The Red Book as an improvisation and Jung as an improviser offers a new approach to understanding the analytic method that emerged from it. Such an approach uncovers the mētic spirit – the spirit of polytropic intelligence – that informs The Red Book and Jung’s method. It can even bring insight into the nature of the collective unconscious. To do so will involve first understanding this sub-rosa tradition, improvisation, in which Jung and The Red Book participate, then exploring the archetypal spirit that inhabits and shapes that tradition.

What do I mean by ‘improviser’ and ‘improvisation’? Improvisation is art that claims, as its etymology suggests, to be somehow un-fore-seen: spontaneous, off-the-cuff, uncrafted, careless, inspired, formless, or chaotic, in sum, as ‘Jung’¹ says of magic, ‘lawless … without rules and by chance’ (Jung, 2009, p. 314). By deploying a ‘decorum of imperfection’ (Keller, 1974, p. 123) with persistent conventions and themes, improvisers try to persuade us that their art is not the product of reason, artifice, or virtuosity.² An enduring art form across many media (literature, visual arts, music, etc.) and genres (epic, lyric, the novel, etc.), improvisations have been hidden in plain sight largely because all claim, like The Red Book: Liber Novus, to be unlike anything you’ve ever seen – uncanonical, a novum repertum or new-found thing (Colie, 1973). Understanding this unrecognized form of discourse invites a new vision of western cultural history. Improv is the discourse of paradigm shifts, those punctuated cultural moments when reason and the way we know the world is challenged and redefined.

To begin a true critical study of improvisation, one must first refuse to play the Goldilocks game critics lapse into: was it improvised too little? too much? or just right? Truman Capote suffers such a lapse when he complains of Kerouac, ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing’. But while Kerouac always presented On the Road as the caffeine-fueled product of three weeks’ typing on a long scroll, it is equally true that he then edited it for six years. Similarly, The Red Book was begun in heat as The Black Books (1913–1914) then until 1928 ‘it’s worked. It’s years of work. Reworked and reworked’, as Hillman points out (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, p. 142). Were they improvised or crafted? As with most self-styled ‘improvised’ texts, the answer is, yes, both.

The point, then, is not to ask if a work of art is improvised or how much, but rather, why do self-styled improvisers insist? That’s when the answers get interesting. Then we begin to see that the claim of improvisation is not only a boast hidden in a disclaimer: you may have to work and study to create, but I just pick up my pen, brush, or instrument. We see that it also authorizes and authenticates: this is more authentic and more valid not because I’ve worked hard at it but precisely because I haven’t worked at all. Such a gesture privileges non-rational ways of making art and knowing the world.

At its worse, the longing for experience unmediated by the mind can be, in Milan Kundera’s words, ‘a longing not to be a [hu]man’ (Kundera, 1987, p. 296). It is to find one’s center of initiative outside oneself in, for example, the muse, or deep inside, for example, in one’s instinctual or animal nature. The roots of this persuasive gesture are rooted in philosophical primitivism. The fundamental idea is that we can get to truth or to a better life not by employing the higher orders of human effort but rather by the lower orders, by our instinctual or animal natures, or by no employment at all. In The Red Book, ‘Jung’ argues that modern man’s problem is that ‘they forgot only one thing: they did not live their animal’ (2009, p. 296). What appeals to ‘Jung’ is the animal’s constraint by instinct: ‘The animal does not rebel against its own kind … . The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it’ (2009, p. 296). The challenge is how to achieve a life at one with our instincts. What faculties or methods should we employ? Improvisers will have various answers – the muse, spontaneity, intuition, automatic writing, drugs – depending on their epoch’s particular paradigm shift. Jung’s paradigm shift will involve various constituents of the unconscious, all outside our conscious control: dreams, archetypes, the collective unconscious.³ ‘Jung’ asserts in The Red Book that

The world accords not only with reason but also with unreason. But just as one employs reason to make sense of the world, in that what is reasonable about it approaches reason, a lack of understanding also accords with unreason. (2009, p. 314)

Unreason, free of the understanding the directed ego seeks and delivers, is Jung’s plan for living in accord with instinct, ‘fittingly and true to the life of [our] species’.

The gesture toward such primitivism is everywhere in our culture. The point is not its truth-value. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Kahneman (2011) describes the many biases that weaken not only the logical, deliberative brain, but also the intuitive brain. Spontaneity’s promise of truth and value can, then, be hollow. The point, truth value-aside, is that both rhetorical approaches – rational and irrational – assert value, authenticity, and authority. The rhetoric of spontaneity does so by privileging non-rational means. Kerouac’s novel implicitly challenges America’s post-war commitment to technology and business. The Red Book challenges (among other things) Freud’s commitment (and Jung’s own) to psychology as an objective science.

Jung’s famous opposition of psychological art to visionary art is equivalent to improvisation’s dialogic opposition to virtuosic art, which grounds its authority in, even as it privileges, skill and rationality.⁴ ‘Psychological art’, explains commentator Susan Rowland, ‘may be subtle, but its artifice is fully present to its audience’ (2005, p. 12). Such art is present to the audience, I would add, because fully present to and understood by the virtuosic artist’s directed consciousness. By contrast, ‘Visionary art’, writes Jung, ‘arises from timeless depths; glamorous, daemonic, and grotesque, it bursts asunder our human standards of values and aesthetic form, a terrifying tangle of eternal chaos’ (1966, p. 90). Arising on its own rather than fashioned by the artist, improvisation has always sought exactly that, by ‘burst[ing] asunder our human standards of values and aesthetic form’, (Jung, 1966, p. 90) to challenge man’s understanding, to challenge our efforts to know the world strictly through systematic, rationalist means, and thereby going beyond rational means to know more of life.

John Stuart Mill’s attack on spontaneity in his posthumously published essay ‘Nature’ (1963–1991) provides a converse benchmark. Mill helps us to draw a finer bead on the rhetoric of spontaneity by describing its dialogic opposite, ‘the rhetoric of reason’, which neuroscientist McGilchrist (2012) points out, ‘most people are completely and unreflectively seduced by’ (loc. 373). Mill’s point in ‘Nature’ is that the same is true of the rhetoric of spontaneity. Mill, long a friend to spontaneity, had reported in the Autobiography that Jeremy Bentham had made him into a ‘mere reasoning machine’, but that Wordsworth’s lyrics saved him (1909, p. 73). Nonetheless, at the end of his life, Mill backpedals. Now, with Rousseau’s celebration of nature and the noble savage particularly in mind, he condemns,

the vein of sentiment so common in the modern world (though unknown to the philosophic ancients) which exalts instinct at the expense of reason, an aberration rendered still more mischievous by the opinion commonly held in conjunction with it that every feeling or impulse which acts promptly without waiting to ask questions is an instinct. Thus almost every variety of unreflecting and uncalculating impulse receives a kind of consecration. (Mill, 1963–1991, 10: 393)

Mill’s appeal to authority – ’unknown to the philosophic ancients’ – is of course specious. Intellectual historians (e.g. Lovejoy & Boas, 1965) have traced the classical roots of the primitivist and naturalist line of thinking that is bread and butter to our improvisers. Even so, Mill perfectly captures the imperfect reasoning behind the frame of mind that consecrates the impulsive and spontaneous. Almost reeling back into a Benthamite, Mill sums up his position emphatically: ‘the ways of nature are to be conquered, not obeyed’ (Mill, 1963–1991, 10: 392).

Mill’s attack on this vulgar Romantic ‘vein of sentiment’ suggests the positivist current against which Jung four decades later will be fighting by embracing the spirit of improvisation. In fact, for millennia, improvisations have formed a countercurrent that has ‘sp[u]n against’, in Melville’s words, the way Western culture ‘drives’ (2000, p. 55; emphasis in text), that is, has spun against the drive toward more and more objective, positivistic rationality. Improv’s spin is to urge us instead to embrace subjectivity and some version of the irrational, depending on what cultural moment it inhabits (from the Muses’ inspiration, to Jung’s unconscious, to the drugs of the Beats). A challenge to the mainstream – to ‘the spirit of the times’ in The Red Book’s parlance – lies at the heart of improvisation. Improvisers punctuate the history of Western culture appearing during paradigm shifts where they, indeed, puncture the dominant notions of how we make and judge value and how we know the world.

Improvisers, then, clump in periods of extreme change: Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, Frans Hals, for example, in the Renaissance; Swift, Sterne, Diderot (e.g. his Le Neveu de Rameau) in the Enlightenment; Wordsworth, Byron, and Blake in the Romantic period. Readers can add their favorites among the many I have left out. Throughout the twentieth century, a crowd of improvisers elbow one another for our attention: surrealists, automatic writers, stream of consciousness novelists, Beats, jazz musicians, Abstract expressionists, performance artists. Just as Pindar’s Odes, Sappho, and the Homeric Hymn to Hermes embrace vatic spontaneity in the face of the nascent rationality and money economy; just as the Renaissance embraced a humanistic openness and freedom that scholastic hair-splitting logic did not allow; just as the Romantics embraced a visionary imagination to combat Newton’s Rainbow and Enlightenment rationalism (‘May God us keep from Single vision and Newton’s sleep’ (Blake, 1970, p. 689)); so too the twentieth century embraced chance and the unconscious to combat the Enlightenment’s bullying heir, the scientific positivism that came of age in the nineteenth century. Freud, far more the rationalist and hence more accessible than Jung, probably takes the laurels for directly influencing more twentieth century improvisers in their quest to explore and embrace the id.⁵ But it was the far more challenging Jung who not only inspired improvisers but also in his own writing more truly embraced the spirit, the tropes, and the formal concerns of improvisation.

Spontaneity’s persuasive appeal is based on our intuitive, if sometimes mistaken sense that whatever is simple, natural, and unlabored is inherently pure, free of the mind’s meddling, and therefore true. Such trust goes together with our deep-seated distrust of human artifice, things contrived for a purpose. ‘We hate poetry’, writes Keats, ‘that has a palpable design upon us’ (2002, p. 58). For Kant, we can truly see the world only if we achieve ‘purposefulness without purpose’ (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck). Such ideas about freeing us from the mind’s mediation and thereby achieving an unmediated experience of reality are the carefree, freewheeling improviser’s stock-in-trade.

A note of skepticism, as with the rhetoric of reason, is in order. For, just as for Disraeli there were ‘lies, damn lies, and statistics’, so too not all instinctual behavior is benign. Some eurekas in the shower are just dumb ideas and, worse, spontaneity is no proof against bad outcomes. Homer’s Odysseus is the king of improvisers but his improvisations get every one of his crewmen killed.⁶ The most monstrous example comes from Jung’s report that Hitler was a man who ‘listens intently to a stream of suggestions from a whispered source and then acts upon them’ (1977, p. 119). Of late, President Trump is giving a bad name to improvisers everywhere.⁷ Instinct, intuition, spontaneity, and inspiration – they have brought us great and terrible results. All of which nevertheless does not gainsay improvisers’ (or Jung’s) pursuit of positive achievements through the magic chaos of spontaneity. If, as ‘Jung’ says in The Red Book, ‘our way needs not only reason but unreason’ (2009, p. 314), then improvisers shed light upon and demonstrate the logos (or the illogos) of unreason.

One effect of such rhetoric is to redefine the hero who embodies and epitomizes the good and the true. To understand the improviser’s – and Jung’s – transgressive redefinition of the heroic we must do some digging into myth. Hermes will be our guide and Odysseus will be our exemplum.

Early in The Red Book the ‘Jung’ character ‘murders’, the word is his, the Germanic culture hero Siegfried who has risen from his unconscious:

I was with a youth in high mountains. …  Then Siegfried’s horn resounded over the mountains with a jubilant sound. We knew that our mortal enemy was coming. We were armed and lurked beside a narrow rocky path to murder him. Then we saw him coming high across the mountains on a chariot made of the bones of the dead. He drove boldly and magnificently over the steep rocks and arrived at the narrow path where we waited in hiding. As he came around the turn ahead of us, we fired at the same time and he fell slain. Thereupon I turned to flee, and a terrible rain swept down. (Jung, 2009, pp. 241–242)

The ‘Jung’ figure is so disturbed by this vision, which we know Jung himself had in a dream (Drob, 2012, p. 39), that he considers suicide if he cannot ‘solve the riddle of the murder of the hero’ (Jung, 2009, p. 242). That is what I propose to do.

Like most riddles, solving it will involve a circuitous journey that here will take us to the Greek Titaness Mētis, the Trickster spirit she informs, and the great epic heroes Achilles and Odysseus. Killing Siegfried, we will see, is equivalent to killing Achilles. Doing so releases Jung to be the polytropic, Odysseus-like Trickster/Shadow who would become his principal persona.

Achilles has been compared to Odysseus at least since Plato’s early dialogue the Lesser Hippias where the issue is who is the more effective liar. I’d like instead to compare them, circuitously I’ll admit, through the lens of the cosmic forces at work in Zeus’s efforts after defeating Chronos to create an orderly universe. As Chronos’s name suggests, time was the problem in that cosmic struggle and it would continue to be Zeus’s problem. Let us go back as it were to the Hellenic Big Bang, the moment when time as the Greeks knew it came into being.

After defeating the Titans and before he took his sister Hera as wife, Zeus, being a projection of Greek warriors, takes the Titans’ conquered women one after the other to wife: first Mētis then Thēmis. Mētis ruled the planet Mercury, Thēmis, Jupiter. They are in spirit related respectively, I will show, to Odysseus and to Achilles.

Sometimes called the goddess of wisdom, Mētis means ‘cunning intelligence’, so hers is a special kind of wisdom.⁸ Hesiod says she is ‘Wiser than any other god or any mortal man’ (1992, p. 85). In her wisdom, she gives Zeus the idea to give an emetic to Chronos who first vomits up the stone of the Delphic Oracle. This symbolically puts the future and its control by means of oracles in play. Then he vomits up Zeus’ brothers and sisters who help Zeus overthrow Chronos. The Hellenic Big Bang: when Chronos ends, time and the problem of time starts.

Time’s first problem is that history repeats itself. Learning from an augury that a son by Mētis would defeat him just as he did Kronos, starting the cycle over again, Zeus decides to swallow her. As a daughter of Okeanos she is a shapeshifter and a challenge to swallow. Like Odysseus and his great-grandfather Hermes, she is polytropic (many-turning, much-traveled, but also ever-cunning).

Mētis is pregnant not with a son but with Athena. With the help of Hermes and Hephaestus, the only other gods who possess mētis,⁹ Zeus’s headache-ridden skull is cleaved and Athena is born. Her mother’s daughter, Athena also possesses mētis. Thus, the three gods who will aid the polytropic Odysseus in his nostos or epic return – Athena, Hephaistos, and Hermes – are mētic intelligences. The fourth deity associated with mētis is the Titan Prometheus, another child of Mētis. His name means ‘forethought’ and, like other mētic beings, he represents the immediacy of a special kind of forethought, more akin to imagination, to the summoning of images, rather than to the categorical thinking of Zeus or Apollo. Mētic intelligence is beginning to sound like Jung’s search for psychic operations free of the directed consciousness. Mētis represents unstructured thought, the leaps of innovation that cannot be taught. Either you have the mētic skill or you don’t.

By marrying and then swallowing Mētis, Zeus attempts to master time’s contingent and ever-fluid chaos. Mētis ‘represents divination through water’ (Detienne & Vernant, 1991, p. 107) and can predict the contingent future. Mētis can predict what may happen if  …. In Mētis’s hands, our fate is open-ended, open-form. Swallowing Mētis, Zeus takes on her mētic intelligence as cosmic force.¹⁰ She sat ‘concealed in Zeus’s entrails’, says Chrisippus (as cited in Yasumura, 2013, p. 87). ‘Zeus stuffed the goddess into his stomach first/So she would devise with him good and evil both’, says Hesiod (1992, p. 86). Though being ingested by Zeus repeats the chronic pattern – pun intended – her presence in Zeus perhaps explains his greater openness: less the tyrant than Chronos, more creative, always forgiving the gods’ wrong doing, and always breaking his own rules.

But seeking a more orderly universe than Mētis can provide, which is to say seeking more control as rulers are wont to do, Zeus’s next marriage is to Thēmis whose name means ‘that which is put in place’ or ‘what’s right’. Her name, like that of Achilles’ mother Thetis, stems from tithenai which means ‘to dispose’ or ‘to order’. ‘Thetic’ today means ‘dogmatic’ and that’s pretty much Themis to a T. She gives birth to the cosmos’ orderly bits, which dispose things as they should be: the Horai (Seasons), Eirene (Peace), Eunomia (Good Order), Dike (Justice), and the Moirai (the Fates: Klotho, Lakhesis, and Atropos). Atropos – remember that last one.

It is Thēmis who is pictured to this day blindfolded with Dike’s scales of justice, adjudicating the affairs of humankind. She is that kind of goddess of wisdom: wisdom as justice, things as they should be. The daughter of the earth-mother Gaia, Thēmis is patron to the oracles of the earth like Delphi, her gift to Apollo who opposes the Achaeans in the Iliad and Odysseus in the Odyssey, angered because they did not do what was right. Thēmis predicts what will happen. Where Mētis amorally accepts the chaos of life, Thēmis represents and enacts a moral order. If Mētis’s mental operations are unstructured and unteachable, Thēmis’s are structured: linear thought that can be taught step by step.¹¹

In Plato’s Myth of Er everyone choses their fate. Fates have different shapes, tighter or looser. Thēmis’ kind of Fate is closed-form, nailed down; Mētis’ is open-form, fluid. In Zeus’ universe, ruled by Thēmis but with Mētis still in his belly, both are possible depending on your daemon, your character, whether you are ruled by Jupiter or Mercury. We are now getting back to Achilles and Odysseus as different versions of the hero.

With his new sovereign order in place, Zeus is free to marry Hera, who continues Thēmis’s oversight of a mostly orderly cosmos. The word ‘hero’, we learn from Harvard classicist Gregory Nagy, is related to Hera and both derive from hora: ‘season, seasonality, the right time, the perfect time’ (2013, p. 32). Hera ‘was the goddess of seasons, in charge of making everything happen on time, happen in season, and happen in a timely way’ (Nagy, 2013, p. 32). Thus, as Nagy explains, etymologically related to Hera and the Horai (the seasons), the classical hero is unseasonal – not in tune with time – until the moment of his death when, finally, he becomes timely, seasonal, fulfilling his destiny, things as they should be. His thread of life finally cut by Thēmis’s daughter Atropos, whose name means ‘no turning’, the hero’s fate is finally perfected.

I’ve said mostly orderly because, big surprise, Zeus’s orderly universe is not perfectly so. Eruptions of chaos on Olympus are never far from sight, just as they aren’t here below. In fact, Zeus’s very pretense to order is an invitation to Trickster to pop up to deflate it, to knock the pretense to order off its high horse and for chaos to intrude. Mētic energy didn’t disappear from the universe when Zeus swallows Mētis. She is a cosmic and eternal force hidden and yet immanent, and lives on in the mētic deities, Athena, Hephaistos and especially, in that pot-stirrer Hermes. So, the agent of that deflation and that chaos is Trickster, Hermes in divine form and his great-grandson Odysseus in human.

And so, I wish to argue, there is another type of hero than the one Nagy allows for. This hero is just the opposite of a-tropos, ‘no-turning’: he is poly-tropic, the many-turning improviser. Polytropos is a word applied to Odysseus in the first line of his eponymous epic, and to no other human in the classical canon, a hapax legomenon classicists don’t take lightly. Polytropic: many-turning, much-traveled, and ever-cunning.

The differences between these heroic types are considerable and they are existential. Where Nagy’s classical hero, Achilles, is defined from without by Atropos and the divinely ordained fate her thread-cutting affirms and completes, the polytropic improviser is defined from within by his mētic alertness to the present moment. He is never complete: despite Tiresias’ prophecy that he can rest when his oar is mistaken for a winnowing fan, he will in Tennyson’s words ‘always roam […] with a hungry heart’ (1969, p. 563). Trickster is lord of the road, fully himself only on the road, only in mētic becoming, not thēmic being.

However he ends, the main point is that the mētic improviser is fully alive when he is alive: ‘As tho’,’ Tennyson’s Ulysses says, ‘as tho [merely] to breathe were life!’ (1969, p. 563). Where the epic hero is timely only at the moment of death when he fulfills his heroic destiny, that is, what he is meant to do, the improviser by contrast defeats death during life by being timely in the passing moment, making each moment count, and thereby shaping his fate himself. The improviser’s destiny, like Chaos Science’s resolution of turbulence into emergent order, is contingent on his actions in the present moment, every present moment, each a flap of a butterfly’s wing, which the improviser alone masters, as far as one can master such a world of contingencies. He improvises without map, without rule book, even without moral compass. Amoral, his one rule is survival. He survives not only by being polytropic. His way is also polysemous (a master of many signs – e.g. the Trojan Horse) and polyainous (as traveler and exile, a master of many discourses and cultures – e.g. the oar/winnowing fan). Achilles is hero as superhero, finally master, the single-minded decider of his fate in the Iliad by doing the right thing (giving Hector’s body back to Priam). Odysseus is the all too human hero who masters fate by submitting to his limitations, his inability fully to master fate, settling for mastering only the present moment and moving on to the next (his men’s death to a man the unfortunate proof of his lack of total mastery). Odysseus, then, is not only great-grandson, but also the human embodiment of his ancestor Hermes, the god of quickness and presence.

Now, one cannot overstate the role of Hermes or Trickster in the work of Jung. In Black Book 5, Philemon tells ‘Jung’ that ‘Hermes is your daimon’ (Jung, 2009, p. 337n). Hermes is the Trickster spirit that suffuses alchemy and magic, both concerns central to Jung. Psychopompos, guide of souls to the underworld, Hermes is the god of the unconscious. The spirit of hermeneutics, he is the source and bringer of meaning. God of communication, it is he that connects the dots for Jung whose work is all connected dots. If Odysseus is Hermes in human form,¹² Jung is another: a polytropic, polysemic, and polyainic psychopompos voyaging in the underworld seas of universal myth.

If Odysseus and Jung are Hermes in human form, the discourse that I call improvisation is its rhetorical and literary expression. Hermes, the psychopompos, and Odysseus are both journeyers to the underworld. Improvisations from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Laurence Stern’s Tristram Shandy to Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and Ginsberg’s Howl are haunted by death. Jung said of Christ’s harrowing of hell that it represented ‘the integration of the collective unconscious which represents an essential part of the individuation process’, (Jung, 1968b, p. 39) his goal for the analytic method. We need all our mētic powers fully to harrow and to glean the unconscious. We need not only reason but unreason, not only structured, but unstructured thought.

The essential premise of The Red Book’s acts of the active imagination is that these imagoes – Salome, Philomen, Abraxis, et al. – arise from the unconscious unbidden and spontaneously. With these he enters into dialogues that go in directions he does not control. This absence of control is also true of the formal and stylistic rhetoric of The Red Book. While presenting itself complete with laboriously hand-lettered Gothic script and illuminations, nonetheless, the rhetoric of the text is, this is the fruit of my unconscious, watch as it unfolds, free-associative, episodic, and turbulent. The book’s formal texture and episodic narrative convey that it is not the product of his directed consciousness, nor, we can now add, his thēmic self. As correct as Paul Bishop may be in urging that The Red Book ‘is a quest for beauty – for “the beauty in me and with myself”’ (Kirsch and Hogenson, 2014, p. 11), and as beautiful as we may personally find it, nonetheless editor Sono Shamdasani is right to point out its esthetic roughness, a quality of immediacy it shares with improvisations: ‘This is not a well-written book, nor are the paintings formally realized, but it is more effective precisely for that reason, or it is affective precisely for that reason. It jars with his own category of the aesthetic’ (2013, p. 28). This is how the rhetoric of spontaneity works, where roughness lends authenticity and power. As Jung writes of Hermes in his alchemical guise, ‘Mercurius’ is ‘the “material upon which nature worked a little, but nevertheless left imperfect”’(Jung, 1967, p. 235). Imperfection has that rhetorical effect: it invites mētic Hermes into the work of art even as it authorizes and validates. As William Carlos Williams writes in Kora In Hell: Improvisations: ‘By the brokenness of his composition the poet makes himself master of a certain weapon which he could possess himself of in no other way’ (1957, p. 19).

Williams’s ‘weapon’ brings us back to the moment in Jung’s improvisation when his persona ignominiously kills the superhero Siegfried, the perfect hero because, like Achilles, he is without fear, and certainly quite contained and self-assured in The Red Book’s rendering. The unheroic nature of the murder is quite clear: shot in the back, twice, from near point blank range. Jung’s illumination of the murder of Siegfried, his little brown man at his persona’s side, is one of his roughest and least masterly. Siegfried is killed not by strength, moral and artistic, but by weakness. ‘Jung’ becomes master of a freedom from mastery.

Now, it is generally agreed in the critical literature that Siegfried represents Sigmund Freud (e.g. Drob, 2012, p. 40). In myth Sigmund is Siegfried’s father and one problem with Freud was that he had become an authoritarian father figure – a thēmic figure, we can now add, dogmatic and unable to acknowledge weakness.

Likewise, it is generally agreed that Jung – who within the Freud circle was known as ‘the blond Siegfried’ – is killing a part of himself, the over-intellectual Jung that had just finished Transformations and Symbols of the Libido, a decidedly objective voyage through the seas of myth (e.g. Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, pp. 38–39). ‘I killed my soul’, he says at the beginning of The Red Book and it is the earlier book that had wielded the knife. Killing Siegfried now releases him to write the more deeply subjective, and we can now add, mētic and hermetic Red Book. By embracing subjectivity, those imagoes who rise from his unconscious, his new book, called Liber Novus after all, will be Jung’s attempt to write his psyche’s dynamics back into the effort to understand the psyche.

Thus, ‘Jung’ is also killing Siegfried because Siegfried is, well, his Achilles heel. Achilles is the strength that is weakness. Siegfried, he states, ‘had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride’ (Jung, 2009, p. 242). That hardly seems prelude to or reason for murder but just before the assassination ‘Jung’ explains why. As if objecting directly to the rule of Thēmis that I have been describing, ‘Jung’ complains that

The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. (2009, p. 240)

In the 1925 seminar, Jung reflects on this moment: ‘I had killed my intellect, helped on to the deed by a personification of the collective unconscious, the little brown man with me. In other words, I deposed my superior function’ (2011, p. 62).

‘The little brown man with me’ who helps him kill Siegfried is Jung’s Shadow, the Trickster spirit, Mētis helping Zeus defeat the authoritarian Chronos. It is the amoral, mētic part of us that the thēmic spirit dogmatically denies and represses. Suppressed, our Shadow grows in power and virulence. Confronted and acknowledged but not necessarily acted upon, the Shadow becomes part of the dance and embrace of binaries – good/evil – that leads to individuation and to health, to richer life.

For Hillman and Shamdasani (2013), The Red Book is Jung’s ‘Lament of the Dead’, not for but of: it gives voice to the dead. Achilles and Odysseus in person are not among them in the Red Book. Nor is Mētis, who is mentioned only once in the Collected Works (Jung, 1960, p. 444) as is Thēmis (Jung, 1956, p. 82n). But adding their voices – Achilles’s thēmic voice and Odysseus’s mētic voice – as background voices in that choir clarifies what is at stake in killing Siegfried and helps us better understand the nature of the subjectivity of the Red Book. They are part of the cosmic forces Jung sought to negotiate in his visionary poetics and analytic method. They come from deep within.

Though mentioned only once in the Collected Works, this cosmic force, the summation of wisdom the Greeks called Mētis, is a mythic correlative to what Jung called the collective unconscious. It resides still in the belly of Zeus, the omphalos of the world, hidden and yet immanent, expressed by her mētic avatars, Hermes the Trickster god foremost. This mētic omphalos Jung would picture as the mandala, a universal expression of the Soul or Self. She is in Zeus’s belly, and in Jung’s, and in ours. Thēmis correlates to the directed consciousness.

Mētis then is not the solution to the riddle of why Jung felt the need to kill Siegfried but just one of many possible imagoes, each an emanation of the Self, each partly our own, partly an articulation of all human history, and partly an expression of Nature’s will – the unus mundus.

Mētis is not the sole solution to our riddle, but it is a compelling one. Though one that Jung apparently did not himself stumble upon, Mētis and the gods and heroes she constellates and that she inspires together constitute an amplification that brings potent insight both to what the collective unconscious is and how one accesses it. Mētis’s cunning, unstructured thought is at the heart of the analytic psychology Jung was talking about and how he performed it.

I have been arguing that in our culture both the rhetoric of spontaneity and of rationality are, and have long been, largely unexamined assumptions. Is, then, spontaneity Jung’s unexamined polestar? Is mētic, unstructured intelligence his sole means to make good on the material that wells up from the collective unconscious?

Hillman and Shamdasani seem to say yes, arguing that the central achievement of The Red Book is that by avoiding concepts, Jung achieves a ‘face-to-face with the chaos of primal experience …’ (2013, p. 67). This unmediated and mētic experience is reflected in Jung’s strict commitment to a narrative, metaphoric, and figurative method and, especially, his freedom from conceptual nomenclature. He shows the Shadow, for example, but does not tell it (name it or explain it). For them the problem is that, ‘fueled by psychology’s will to science’, Jung later fell back upon ‘a safety [or “guard”] rail’ against the chaos (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, p. 74). After The Red Book, Jung falls back into the trap of scientism that he abjured in Freud and in himself. ‘The curatorium’, as Shamdasani dismissively calls Jung’s followers – that would be you, lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère – have ‘mistaken the guard rail for the essence’ (2013, p. 72).

But Mētis does not act alone in bringing the chaos of the unconscious to consciousness. While Jung’s conceptual arsenal may sometimes keep us from ‘the face-to-face with the chaos of primal experience’, Hillman and Shamdasani mistake the genre Jung is working in. Like most improvisations, ‘reworked and reworked’, The Red Book’s ‘face-to-face’ is rhetorical, an achieved effect. Jung’s ‘letting the chaos in’ (Hillman & Shamdasani, 2013, p. 171) is an achieved effect. And they miss (or dismiss) the many ways that Jung’s work after The Red Book challenges discursiveness using other rhetorical effects. There are after all more ways than one to skin, or to put a skin on, chaos. Writing before publication of The Red Book, Rowland (2005) explores the many anti-discursive formal and rhetorical devices Jung deploys post-Red Book that work against his conceptual arsenal even as he makes use of it. As always in improvisation, the degree of immediacy, of face-to-face unmediated experience, is dialogic: it is more ‘primal’ – I use the scare quotes advisedly – than Freud’s. Jung’s later work is less ‘primal’ than The Red Book but still far more so than the ever-discursive Freud.

Most important to us here, Hillman and Shamdasani also miss Jung’s retreat from radical immediacy and unreason, a retreat intrinsic to improvisations (and for me definitive of the great improvisations). That they stake out their own radical posture in a dialogue, which privileges freedom and immediacy, is telltale.¹³ Welcome, gentlemen, to the improvisers’ club. This is what improvisations always do. But having mounted a radical challenge to reason and rationality, improvisers – apart Hillman and Shamdasani – always offer in the end a both/and, not an either/or. Rather than reject, improvisers seek in the end to purify, to enlarge, or to enrich reason. As is the pattern in improvisation, Jung’s call to go beyond rationalism, to embrace unreason, is in the end moderated. While writing the Scrutinies section, Jung writes to J. B. Lang that,

The danger consists in the prophet’s delusion which often is the result of dealing with the unconscious. It is the devil who says: Disdain all reason and science, mankind’s highest powers. That is never appropriate even though we are forced to acknowledge [the existence of] the irrational. January 17, 1918. (as cited in Jung, 2009, p. 207)

Hillman might respond, as Blake (1970) said of Milton (1972), that Jung ‘was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it’ (p. 35). But soon after abandoning The Red Book, Jung writes in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious:

Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, let it at least be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too—as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an ‘individual’. (Jung, 1968a, p. 288)

Jung’s active imaginings in the Black Books and his years-long redaction of The Red Book constitute respectively that hammer and anvil. The retreat from radical immediacy Jung expresses here may not content Hillman and Shamdasani but it has the advantage of giving voice unknowingly to another group of the dead, the many improvisers, who, caught up like Jung each in enacting the paradigm shift of their age, have performed a like retreat from a radical embrace of irrationality and chaos. To have a taste for chaos does not mean to make a complete commitment to it. The hero is called to journey into the lawless green world but not to stay there; he must return with his wound to make it a boon. In the end, for Jung ‘it is man’s capacity for consciousness alone [that] makes him man’ (Jung, 1960, p. 210) The polytropic Mētis might be his hammer in confronting chaos, but in the end Thēmis’s anvil is also needed to forge an individual.

Embracing the expressive tension between reason and unreason, craft and careless spontaneity, art and artlessness, determinism (Freudian determinism in Jung’s case) and freedom, Jung and The Red Book together join the long tradition of improvisers and improvisations. Though rationality is the thematic crux of most improvisations, examples of the form differ, depending on the historical moment, regarding the kind of Unreason (be it divine inspiration, the unconscious, madness, instinct, chance, etc.) they embrace, and regarding the degree to which they propose to reject Reason and embrace Unreason.

But on a deeper thematic level, improvisations, perhaps each and all of them, share the persistent theme of sympathy. It is not by accident that improvisations from Montaigne’s Essays to Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass are read and loved for their embodied details. In their digressions, free-associative style, and catalogs, improvisers shower love upon the minutiae of life. In Leaves of Grass, Whitman expresses first the idea at the heart of the catalog,

I do not doubt but the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world. (1860, p. 217, emphasis added)

He then demonstrates this beauty in a disruptive catalog which leaps from item to item without logical sequence:

I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, rejected refuse, than I have supposed … . (1860, p. 217, emphasis added)

Whitman’s illogical, meandering catalog jumps from one order of discourse to another (‘trivialities’ to ‘insects’ to ‘vulgar persons’, etc.), underscoring that Whitman means open-endedly to embrace all the ‘iotas’ he leaves out. And yet, in proper rhetorical form, Whitman’s catalog ends climactically. The summation, ‘rejected refuse’, is just what the indecorous improviser seeks to champion and to embrace, expanding the parameters of what we can see and know and love. This is why reason’s blinders must be thrown off: to see more of the world, not just ‘the broad highway’ but ‘the back streets’ (Jung, 1966, p. 83). And yet the properly climactic shape of Whitman’s catalog suggests that well-schooled reason too is at work. The tension – unreason/reason; carelessness/craft – is characteristic of improvisation.

In The Red Book, ‘Jung’ learns from the spirit of the depths that ‘the small, narrow, and banal is not nonsense, but one of both of the essences of the Godhead’ (2009, p. 230).¹⁴ The worldly and encyclopedic texture of improv – the suggestion that nothing is below or beyond its purview – brings before the reader the whole sweep of experience and opens both text and self to life’s messiness. In Jung’s case, it is the messiness of encyclopedic mythic experience, from Gnosticism to Alchemy to the Bible, that serves this role, suggesting that anything that has ever been envisioned or thought offers possible dramatis personae.¹⁵ The improviser urges us to seize not, in melancholy mood, just the passing day, but to seize passionately the ever-renewing cornucopia of life: carpe vitam. Hillman and Shamdasani finally agree that this is psychology’s proper goal and Jung’s achievement: ‘What’s effective or what enables a person to live more fully’ (2013, p. 16).

This convention of embracing all of life – worldly or mythic – has both a rhetorical and a thematic effect. Like Terence, the improviser says, ‘Nothing human is foreign to me’. Amid its often satiric or burlesque texture – and one must not miss the satire in The Red Book – improvisation treads the ‘back streets’ presenting the imperative of sympathy and kinetically, performatively showing us how: through an openness to all the experience it bodies forth. At the heart of their satire, blindness and one-sided constriction persist as the essential targets. The improviser helps us empathically to judge our follies in terms of all the world’s follies and solicits our love for one another (and oneself) in the here-and-now. ‘Jung’ learns from Philemon that ‘This work cannot be done without love for ourselves’ (2009, p. 338).

Emphatically a poetics of presence, improvisation would have us embrace the presence all around us, if only, they say, we would open our eyes to it, removing the veil placed on us by rationality and systematic logic. Jung shows us the way to celebrate the charming failings, as it were, of the unconscious: on the one hand the deplorable, selfish, and sometimes laughable intrusions of the Shadow; on the other the admirable and inspiring acts of the Transcendent Function, which fashions symbols without the control of our directed consciousness.

Jung’s willingness to embrace these creative fantasies, ‘to trust the image’, echo the improviser’s poetics of presence, the belief that our challenge is to be here, now, without judging, dealing like Odysseus with what is before us and responding to and shaping it as we will, in the moment. Like many improvisations¹⁶ The Red Book suddenly breaks off. The fragment as form rhetorically challenges received notions of formal order and completion and opens a window into new possibilities. The Red Book’s last word is Möglichkeit, possibility, suggesting that the well of creative fantasies is bottomless and, by implicitly pointing ahead, reflecting improvisation’s impulse to catalog everything. This impulse expresses, for poet Richard Wilbur, ‘a longing to possess the world, and to praise it’ (quoted in Hirsh, 1999, p. 75). Sharing improvisation’s tendency to digression and to the episodic handling of narrative, The Red Book presses toward apocalypse with every episode, almost every paragraph. Each is epiphanic, a revelation of, an opening up to, the transcendent in the present moment.

Together these epiphanies enact the twentieth century’s momentous paradigm shift in which Jung was a central actor, where, hammered on the anvil of consciousness, the collective unconscious enters the modern world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Randy Fertel is a writer and philanthropist dedicated to the arts, education, New Orleans, and the environment. Fertel holds a PhD in English and American literature from Harvard University and is the author of the award-winning books A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation and The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir now in its fourth edition.

Notes

1. Scare quotes will distinguish ‘Jung’ the Red Book's persona from Jung the person.

2. I offer a taxonomy of improvisation's persistent conventions that seek to persuade us they are truly improvised in A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation (2015).

3. Ulrich Hoerni writes that ‘The Red Book would thus be a poetic vision of a paradigm shift in psychotherapy’ in Kirsch and Hogenson (2014, p. 9).

4. I say ‘dialogic’ because while improvisations always claim to be unmediated by previous texts, in fact they always are in dialogue with some form or genre they profess is more rigid and less authentic than their own. ‘Dialogic’ comes of course from Bakhtin (1981) whose work on the carnivalesque anticipates my vision of improvisation.

5. Freud (1943) seems to have been horrified at artists’ embrace of the id. In his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, the founder of the free-associative talking cure feels called upon to warn with apparent anxiety that ‘it is out of the question that part of the analytic treatment should consist of advice to “live freely”’ (p. 375).

6. On Odysseus’ tragically inept leadership, see Shay (2002) who writes, ‘Odysseus emerges not as a monster, but as a human like ourselves’, (p. 120).

7. See my ‘Donald Trump and the Politics of Improvisation’ (2016).

8. My discussion of Mētis owes much to Detienne and Vernant's groundbreaking work (1991).

9. Paris (1998) adds ‘Aphrodite, Pandora, Ariadne, the sorceress Medea, the magician Circe’ to the list of mētic deities (loc. 1549).

10. Paris (1998) reminds us these Titanesses are eternal cosmic forces: when Zeus swallows Mētis, her mētic power lives on in him (loc. 2201).

11. Thanks to Richard Seaford for this luminous opposition between structured and unstructured thought.

12. See my argument to this effect in Chapter 7, A Taste for Chaos (2015).

13. Dialogues are legion in the improv tradition: More's Utopia, Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesie, Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau, Valéry's Idée Fixe, to name but a few.

14. Bailey (1993), himself a practitioner of ‘total improvisation’ or ‘free music’, finds this leveling of hierarchies in musical improvisation. Speaking of Indian raga, Bailey finds that

something common to most improvised music, is that different constituents do not have obvious hierarchical values. Anything which can be considered as decoration, for instance, is not in some way subservient to that which it decorates. The most powerful expression of the identity of a piece might be in the smallest details. (p. 5)

It is this loving embrace of detail that motivates and charges Jung's near contemporary Louis Armstrong's famed minimalism to which Schuller (1968) attributes a ‘“democratization” of rhythmic values’ (8). For early aficionado of hot jazz Hugues Panassié,

As [Armstrong] went on, his improvisations grew hotter, his style became more and more simple – until at the end there was nothing but the endless repetition of one fragment of melody – or even a single note insistently sounded and executed with cataclysmic intonations. (as cited in Bailey, 1993, p. 50; emphasis added)

15. In the twentieth century this becomes the ‘heterogeneous matter’ that French philosopher Georges Bataille and the Surrealists force us to embrace; it is what German critic Benjamin (1978) calls ‘profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration’. (p. 179; emphasis in text). ‘Abstract art’, artist George McNeil remarks of Jackson Pollock's action paintings, ‘is an unfortunate misnomer – it is actually the most concrete of styles’ (as cited in Belgrad, 1999, p. 114). Daniel Belgrad adds: ‘Indeed, its insistent materiality was intended as a radical counterstatement to the “abstract” quality of the scientific method’ (p. 114). The same is said of Kerouac's ‘body of fiction’: ‘The representation of the magical nature of entrancing and life-affirming fleeting detail is the outstanding feature’ (Cunnell, 2008, p. 16).

16. For example, Petronius's Satyricon, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’, and Byron's Don Juan.