A Jungian Reading of the Hero’s Journey

A Jungian Reading of the Hero’s Journey

http://acoldandlonelystreet.blogspot.com/ Ash Hibbert

http://acoldandlonelystreet.blogspot.com/


Contents

Abbreviations 4

Introduction 6

Chapter 1: The Hero and the Shadow 10

Literary Active Imagination 11

Implications of Literary Active Imagination 14

Reconciliation with the Shadow 17

Chapter 2: The Hero and Androgyny 22

Androgyny 22

Reconciliation with the Anima 24

Chapter 3: The Hero and their Community 30

Vision and Truth 31

Ego and the Unconscious 34

The Community 38

Passing the Torch 40

The Spiral-Shaped Journey 42

Reconciliation with the Persona 44

Conclusion 49

Appendix - Synopsis 51

Chapter 2 (25-54) 51

Chapter 4 (78-105) 52

Chapter 6 (129-59) 53

Chapter 8 (194-223) 53

Chapter 10 (254-76) 53

Chapter 1 (5-24) 54




Chapter 3 (55-77) 54

Chapter 5 (106-28) 54

Chapter 9 (224-53) 55

Chapter 11 (277-89) 55

Chapter 13 (313-9) 56

Bibliography 57

Primary Texts 57

Works Cited 58

Works Consulted 61




Abbreviations

Parenthetical page numbers refer to Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. London:

Orion Publishing Group, 1999.

‘CW’ refers to The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vols. 1-22 edited by Sir Herbert

Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, translated by R.F.C. Hull. New York:

Pantheon Books, 1953-<1991>




Introduction

I will be using Jungian psychology to show how literature strongly relates to

everyday life, how Speculative Fiction is especially capable of helping facilitate

psychic and social development, and how Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed

offers valuable insights to the human condition.

The Dispossessed, as well as being Speculative Fiction, is about an individual. Le

Guin’s essay on the importance of a realistic protagonist, ‘Science Fiction and Mrs.

Brown’ (Language of the Night 112), emphasizes how The Dispossessed, and all of

its characters, grew out of a vision of a person. Le Guin’s adamant privileging of the

individual in The Dispossessed makes it an ideal novel for an exploration of a model

of personal development.

Jungian Psychology will assist in reading The Dispossessed by focusing on the main

protagonist, Shevek. While characters do not possess an unconscious or

subconscious (Stiller 36; also see Holland ‘Shakespearian Tragedy’ 207-17, and

Holland Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare) they are the canvas that receives the

projection of both the writer and reader’s ego - Shevek can thus be situated as the

exclusive ‘ego’ of the novel as he is the “primary carrier” of Le Guin’s unconscious

personality (Cambridge Companion to Jung 256-7; see also Franz An Introduction to

the Interpretation of Fairy Tales). This illustrates Le Guin’s particular investment in

realistically developing Shevek.

In spite of its shortfalls, Jung’s psychology remains an authorized (CW 15 par. 133)

and useful tool for feminist and non-feminist critics alike to read literature by

(Lauter and Rupprecht 3). Robert Segal highlights that while Freud is useful to

understand an individual in their early years, Jung is useful to understand the latter

years (Jung on Mythology 8-9). While Shevek’s infancy, childhood, and youth is

highly relevant to his later development, it is only detailed in one of the novel’s




thirteen chapters, thus providing far less material to work with compared to the rest

of his life. The exclusion of Freud from an analysis of Shevek, then, is not from

loyalty to Jung -Jung’s theories are simply more pertinent.

Jung and Le Guin also hold very similar views on personal development of the

individual and it is in part due to their similarities that I will use an allegorical

reading of The Dispossessed to illustrate Jung’s views. Though this approach is but

one of many possible ways of reading the novel and characters, I plan to demonstrate

the success of a Jungian reading of Le Guin’s work even though Le Guin is not

Jungian (Rochelle 31n.120). Rather, I intend to demonstrate that Le Guin,

especially in light of The Dispossessed, shares similar views on the human

condition with Jung. I will also briefly discuss Orson Scott Card’s Enders Quartet,

which also reflects views similar to Jung.

Jungian psychology will also be useful as the mode of communication between Le

Guin and mythologist Joseph Campbell whose model of the hero’s journey I will

explore. Campbell preferred Jung’s view on myth to Freud’s because of Jung’s view

that “the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life furthering ends”,

contrast to Freud who saw myths as “errors to be refuted, surpassed, and supplanted

finally by science” (Myths to Live By 12-3). Yet while Segal describes Campbell as

“Jungian-oriented” (Jung on Mythology 13) he is also described as “too eclectic to

qualify as a full-fledged Jungian” (43). Campbell “praises Jung rather than defers to

him” (125-6).

Both Jung and Campbell attributing the origins of myth to Independent Invention,

yet while Campbell saw the invention of myth arising through commonly shared

experiences, Jung attributed myth to Independent Invention through heredity –

specifically through the inheritance of archetypes (Joseph Campbell 126-30).

Moreover, like Jung, Campbell saw myth as revealing




The existence of a severed, deeper reality … as a vehicle for

actually encountering that reality [and] as a model for others. But

where for Jung myth fulfils these functions even when its meaning

remains unconscious, for Campbell myth works only when ‘sages’

reveal its meaning. (131).

Campbell also saw myths as linking people to the cosmos, society, and themselves

(131). Compared to Jung, Campbell is a transcendental mystic who “preaches

absorption in the unconscious” – while Jung is an immanent who “preaches balance:

neither rejection of the unconscious nor surrender to it” (133).

Since Pearson and Pope’s landmark Female Hero in American and British

Literature however, Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces has been less of an

affirmative touchstone for the hero’s journey and more used as sport by Feminists.

Pearson and Pope attempt to make up for Campbell’s poor representation of women

in his model of the hero, but even their title suggests that the endeavour to find a

model of the hero’s journey applicable to both men and women is far from

complete. Jung’s notions of androgyny and the contrasexual figure offer a remedy

for the gender exclusivity of Campbell, Pearson and Pope, and thus it will be

helpful in an attempt to include both men and women in a single model of the hero’s

journey.

Another shortfall of Campbell is the absence of a balanced, egalitarian relationship

portrayed between the hero and their community. Campbell, while constantly

privileging the hero and casting them as fitting to become tyrant of their world

shows the hero as a timeless instrument of their community. Subsequently, I will

endeavour to highlight ways in which The Dispossessed challenges Campbell, by

providing models of relationships between individual and community, man and

woman, based less on mutual use and more on mutual respect.

Finally, a Jungian analysis of Shevek provides an illustration of Jung’s concept of

the Archetype – of their personal characteristics, and of the unmediated relationship




that can be formed between them and the ego.




Chapter 1: The Hero and the Shadow

This chapter will, like those following, attempt to link literature with personal

development. In this chapter, I will specifically be drawing from the Jungian practice

of Active Imagination, and Jung’s notion of the reconciliation with the shadow figure.

The approach of this chapter is indicative of the trend in the latter chapters: to show

Jungian psychology as useful in challenging conventional notions of, and

approaches to, the hero’s journey. This challenge precedes a demonstration of how

Shevek, as the vehicle of Le Guin’s Jungian-like sentiments, specifically illustrates

the way that readers can live out that alternate model. Shevek’s acts of

reconciliation with the archetypal figures represented by some of the characters,

which become the focus towards the end of each chapter here, are valuable as a

literal model for readers’ own personal development. I will also highlight instances

where The Dispossessed provides counter-examples – where Shevek and other

characters fall victim to possession by, and projection of, archetypal figures.

Shevek’s acts of reconciliation are also useful as a medium for the audience’s own

development - a potential that Appleyard suggests in school-age readers (14) and

that I will suggest is available to all readers.

While Appleyard condemns uncritical or precritical approaches to reading (2) his

descriptions of what motivates lay-reading outside of academia highlights such

readers’ yearning for relevancy (1). Though some of the subsequent strategies used

by lay-readers to gain a sense of relevancy can be highly questionable (1) the desire

to find meaning in one’s life is of pure intent. Just as traditional literary criticism

aims to help inform the dialogue that we establish between ourselves and a text

(Novels for Students xi), so too does the spontaneous form of reader response

endeavour to bridge a link between author and audience. Great novels “force us to

think – about life, literature, and about others, not just about ourselves” (xi). The

question thus becomes whether a model of reader response that is personal, active,

and encourages us to understand ourselves in the context of the world, can offer the




same if not a greater wealth of insights compared to traditional literary criticism and

help unlock the greatness of a novel.

I believe that it can.

Literary Active Imagination

Speculative Fiction writers, in order to avoid fulfilling the Freudian opinion “that

all artists are undeveloped personalities with marked infantile autoerotic traits” (CW

15 par. 156), need to go beyond writing fiction that is simply “wet dreams” (Le Guin

Compass Rose 220). Le Guin navigates around the Freudian stereotype by

considering the results of her creative processes to be Thought Experiments –

“devices of the imagination used to investigate nature” (Brown ‘Thought

Experiments’). In the context of Speculative Fiction, the Thought Experiment is a

case of detective work into our social and personal beings, compatible and

comparable with Jung’s concept of Active Imagination.

Active Imagination is a Jungian term to denote a process of becoming conscious of

deep, repressed childhood complexes, as well as developing orientating insights,

using play (Chodorow 2). It is “a method Jung developed to induce an active

dialogue with the unconscious while in a waking state” (Cambridge Companion to

Jung 314). The process of Active Imagination involves two major stages:

In his discussion of the first step, Jung speaks of the need for

systematic exercises to eliminate critical attention and produce a

vacuum in consciousness … It involves a suspension of our rational,

critical faculties in order to give free rein to fantasy … Jung speaks of

the first step in terms of wu wei, that is, the Taoist idea of letting

things happen … In the second part of active imagination,

consciousness takes the lead. As the affects and images of the

unconscious flow into awareness, the ego enters actively into the

experience. This part might begin with a spontaneous string of




insights; the larger task of evaluating and integration remains. In the

German language, this is the auseinandersetzung [which is] usually

translated as ‘coming to terms’ with the unconscious. (Chodorow 10-

11)

A classic example of the use of Active Imagination is the first recorded under that

term, around Christmas 1912. It occurred when, after his break with Freud, Jung

sought to “bridge the distance from the present” (Jung Memories, Dreams,

Reflections 198) back to his childhood, in order to locate the cause of a disturbance in

his dream life. Jung managed to create this ‘bridge’ with pebbles – he began

collecting stones from the shore of a lake near his home, and used them to construct

miniature buildings. This re-enacted a childhood pastime and lead to the release of

“a stream of fantasies which [he] later carefully wrote down” (199).

Rowland, in C.G. Jung and Literary Theory draws strong comparisons between

Active Imagination and reading:

‘Active Imagination’ … involves the taking of an image from a

dream or a cultural text and concentrating on it, so relaxing the

conscious mind. The Jungian creative unconscious will then

spontaneously erupt and guide fantasies … Words on the page are

one step removed from visual images. Reading a fiction will provoke

mental images and these will be affected by the Jungian

unconscious [thus] reading fiction promotes individuation. (196)

Rowland argues that reading helps excavate unconscious material and promote

individuation. This process leads to “a more conscious awareness of one’s specific

individuality, including recognition of both one’s strengths and one’s limitations”

(Cambridge Companion to Jung 316). Rowland argues that using literature to

stimulate Active Imagination benefits both author and reader:

Writing fiction can also be absorbed into this model. If a writer is in

contact with her creative unconscious, then her writing will again be




part of her individuation because the unconscious will guide the

psychic signifiers. The writing of art becomes an alchemic w(rite).

(196-7)

I would like to follow Susan Rowland’s lead from her discussion of Jungian theory

and reader response (196-7), and suggest that the Speculative Fiction genre is

specially suited to providing texts useful for facilitating Active Imagination. I will

refer to the form of reading that combines Literature, and Active Imagination, as

Literary Active Imagination.

Speculative Fiction embodies Fantasy, which is a ‘genre’ or mindset that as

children we were used to because it involved using forms of ‘play’. Therefore, it is

a suitable method for Active Imagination. A long-standing criticism of Speculative

Fiction is that it is escapist, and in Literary Active Imagination, there is a degree of

truth in this: the first stages of Active Imagination as outlined by Jung give the

imagination free reign to allow the conscious mind to depart the conventions and

restrictions of consensual reality. By practicing Active Imagination we ‘re-enact’

our childhood, temporarily regressing to our childhood state, and re-experience the

fears and anxieties that are the seed to our later complexes. However, since Jung

stresses that Active Imagination involves reflecting on the resultant fantasy, we

would then disengage from the process of play, and with the benefit of an adult’s

vocabulary and understanding, objectively analyse what emotions moved through us,

retrospectively nipping our complexes in the bud. The writer encouraging, and the

reader allowing, a suspension of disbelief when they engage with a text is

necessary in achieving Literary Active Imagination. The text would then need to be

sufficiently remarkable for the reader to consider the moral and ethical implications

in terms of their own lives, and thus gain new insights into both themselves and the

human condition.

Literary Active Imagination provides a model of fiction that prevents writing from

cultivating neurosis in the author, and instead speaks “from the mind and heart of the




artist to the mind and heart of mankind” (CW 15 par. 156), by attempting to connect

people’s minds with their hearts. However, this is not to suggest that Literary

Active Imagination would avoid neurosis entirely. Instead, Active Imagination gives

neuroses free rein to express themselves. The darkest, ‘wettest’ dream that the

author can imagine would manifest itself on paper. Yet what separates Literary

Active Imagination from becoming self-indulgent writing is that the former allows an

‘ambushing’ of the neurosis once it is out in the open. Once the neurosis is let ‘be’,

the reader brings the social element into play, and they can then trace the neurosis

back to its root.

This process of temporarily surrendering to one’s neurosis shares parallels with

Jung’s theory of releasing libido through regression:

It (regression) contains both the illness and the potential cure … The

ability to regress, particularly to go through and beyond childhood

conflicts and trauma, is another of the psyche’s self-regulating

mechanisms (Cambridge Companion to Jung 64; emphasis added).

Speculative Fiction can clearly help facilitate Active Imagination, and induce that

childhood state, and because Speculative Fiction must encourage a suspension of

disbelief, it can encourage a revaluation of one’s worldviews.

Implications of Literary Active Imagination

While psychological readings of texts can set out to illuminate the intentions,

motives, and desires of the author, more often than not the critical process reveals

many of the prejudices of the critics themselves. While Jung warns writers that the

more personal idiosyncrasies in a creation “the less it is a work of art” (CW 15 par.

156), superimposing personal idiosyncrasies on a work can be as destructive as if the

author had written them in, in the first place (par. 134). Critics can hypothesise what

the author ‘intended’, yet only for the exclusive purpose of opening ourselves to

alternative readings of the text.




Writing, Jung suggests, can be an opportunity for the writer to achieve a greater

awareness of himself or herself:

The creative urge which finds its clearest expression in art is irrational

and will in the end make a mockery of all our rationalistic

undertakings. All conscious psychic processes may well be causally

explicable; but the creative act, being rooted in the immensity of the

unconscious, will forever elude our attempts at understanding. It

describes itself only in its manifestations; it can be guessed at, but

never wholly grasped. (par. 135)

Jung would find agreement in at least some writers, including Le Guin, who explains

that rather than planning her fictitious universes ‘Earthsea’, she “found it … in [her]

subconscious” (Language of the Night 48):

I did not deliberately invent Earthsea. I did not think ‘Hey wow –

islands are archetypes and archipelagos are superarchetypes and

let’s build us an archipelago!’ I am not an engineer, but an explorer. I

discovered Earthsea. (49-50)

Le Guin’s perception of her work as resulting from hidden depths within herself (49-

50), and Joan Didion’s explanation that “I write entirely to find out what I’m

thinking … what I want and what I fear”, suggests that writers already (without the

assistance of Jungian critics) appreciate the therapeutic value that their writing has

for them. What remains is for the reader to come to a similar appreciation and to

investigate the personal implications of the text, to achieve greater understanding of

their own psyche, and thus to progress closer to an attainment of Self. Rather than

using literary criticism to locate the mental status of the author, using Literary

Active Imagination allows readers to find out what they themselves are thinking.

The reader’s task is to explore a number of their own emotive reactions to a text, and

then to try tracing those emotive responses back to their complexes. As Appleyard

demonstrates, however, there are many different and equally valid reasons people




read - from building an understanding of social conventions (‘reader as hero or

heroine’), to better perceiving the nature of existence (‘reader as thinker’), to

simply completing their English Major (‘reader as interpreter’) (14).

It may be overly demanding to request that the way people read is accelerated (17).

As developmentalists would argue, an exploration of an individual’s own inner

world may be best left until the reader has firmly established a thorough

understanding of their natural, social, and intellectual world. This, Appleyard

suggests, is an undertaking available to the ‘pragmatic reader’ – an adult who reads

outside of any institutional requirements. Appleyard describes how the adult reader

May read in several ways, which mimic, though with appropriate

differences, the characteristic responses of each of the previous

roles: to escape, to judge the truth of experience, to gratify a sense

of beauty, to challenge oneself with new experience, to comfort

oneself with images of wisdom. What seems to be common to these

responses is that adult readers now much more consciously and

pragmatically choose the uses they make of reading. (15)

What I am very much interested in is a society that encourages people, at whatever

age, to take charge of the way that they read – specifically, to facilitate their own

bibliotherapy and text-driven development. Being neither a philologist nor child

psychologist it may be out of my jurisdiction to explore ways in which children

could become readers that are more pragmatic. However, what comes across from

Appleyard is that the different roles that readers take coincide with their

environment – the institution that the individual belongs to can regulate their

capacity to engage in a text. Thus, suggestions of how to create a generation of

young pragmatic readers would very likely be highly critical of those institutions.

Instead of criticizing the schooling system however, I will limit my exploration to

how adult readers could further their reading skills. Using Literary Active

Imagination, readers could engage in a single text with the whole spectrum of roles




that Appleyard outlines. Clearly, each role carries within itself great value for the

reader, yet the full benefit of reading may only be attained through the capacity to

‘play’ every role within a single session. While the ‘pragmatic reader’ would appear

to already possess this versatility, Appleyard’s description of the adult reader is of

one who sets out to read a text with a set, and diluted, role. For instance, if an adult

is to read Speculative Fiction with an escapist agenda, the philosophical implications

of such a text would be lost. Also, even if they were to read a text as a ‘thinker’,

their adult sensibilities would prevent them from an adequate suspension of disbelief

required to fully entertain a new world outlook (17).

The developmental model of the five roles taken by readers (outlined by

Appleyard) parallels the stages of Active Imagination. As they mature, the reader

moves from a passive indulgence in fantasy that resembles wu wei, to a more active

analysis of the social and philosophical implications of the text – the

auseinandersetzung stage.

We can integrate Appleyard’s description of the ‘evolution’ of reader response theory

with Jung’s process of Active Imagination, to create a model where a reader can

undertake all four distinct roles in one sitting. Rather than reflecting on the cultural

implications of a text however, they should focus on their own personal response.

Engaging in a temporary, deliberate amnesia, the Jungian ‘Pragmatic Reader’

would forget all sensibilities and preconceived notions of the text’s genre, to read as

‘player’ and ‘hero(ine)’, and then to later reflect as ‘thinker’ and ‘interpreter’.

Reconciliation with the Shadow

The goal of Active Imagination shares strong parallels with Jung’s concept of

reconciliation with the Shadow – that is, “unconscious aspects of the personality

characterized by traits and attitudes which the conscious ego does not recognize in

him- or herself” (Cambridge Companion to Jung 319) – that only “becomes hostile

only when he is ignored or misunderstood.” (Man and his Symbols 182):




If the shadow figure contains valuable, vital forces, they ought to be

assimilated into actual experience and not repressed. It is up to the

ego … to live out something that seems to be dark but actually may

not be. (184)

In addition, as Whitmont writes:

What seems evil, or at least meaningless and valueless to

contemporary experience and knowledge, might on a higher level of

experience and knowledge appear as the source of the bet –

everything depending, naturally, on the use one makes of one’s seven

devils. To explain them as meaningless robs the personality of its

proper shadow, and without this it loses its form. The living form

needs deep shadow if it is not to appear plastic. Without shadow it

remains a two- dimensional phantom, a more or less well brought up

child. (238-9)

In Literary Active Imagination, the audience could undergo the process Jung

referred to as the ‘withdrawal of projections’. Through the text’s protagonists, the

reader could reassume responsibility for those sins projected onto the protagonist’s

‘Shadow’ at the point in which the hero recognizes the similarities between

themselves and their nemesis (Hauge 76). This would allow the reader to adopt

those characteristics most useful at that point in life (Cambridge Companion to Jung

319).

Reconciliation with the Shadow can occur on a social scale (Wehr 61-2; Language of

the Night 64) as well as on a personal scale, illustrated by Shevek’s relationship with

Pae, a fellow scientist on Urras. From Shevek’s first night on Urras, Saio Pae

maintains a subtle yet significant presence in Shevek’s life. The first indication of

the danger that Pae presents comes to Shevek directly as a warning: “‘Pae isn’t

dangerous to you because he’s personally slippery, Shevek. He’s dangerous to you

because he is a loyal, ambitious agent of the Ioti Government’” (115). This recalls




Campbell’s claim that the first opponent of the hero is the Patriot (Hero 389).

Pae assists Shevek’s transformation into a good Urrasti professor by taking him

shopping for clothes (110), yet his next major appearance is much darker, when

Shevek imagines seeing him at Vea’s party - “He thought he saw Pae across the

room, but there was so many faces that they blurred together … Something dark

turned over in Shevek’s mind, darkening everything” (189). This hallucination is

very telling and appropriate because of Shevek’s un-Odonian behaviour. It is almost

as if Pae is infiltrating Shevek’s psyche, possessing him, and transforming him into

an Urrasi. While at the party, Shevek becomes intoxicated, argues about the war,

self-righteously explains the superiority of Odonians over A-Iotians, and attempts

to force himself on Vea. The longer he spends on Urras, the more he becomes like

Pae. His hallucinations of Pae represent the manifestation of his dark side, his

shadow. A very telling remark of the bond between Pae and Shevek is when the latter

muses

He (Pae) had not done anything original, but his opportunism, his

sense for where advantage lay, led him time after time to the most

promising field. He had the flair for where to set work, just as Shevek

did, and Shevek respected it in him as in himself, for it is a singularly

important attribute in a scientist. (229)

The following morning, a hung-over Shevek realizes that Pae holds the key to the

“gracious prison cell” he is in (229). Very soon, however, he begins to reflect on

what he can extract from his prison warden:

He had come to Urras simply to meet Saio Pae, his enemy? That he

had come seeking him, knowing that he might receive from his

enemy what he could not receive from his brothers and friends, what

no Anarresi could give him: knowledge of the foreign, of the alien:

news … (230)




This is a very important step according to Jung in the individual’s reconciliation

with the Shadow. Once Shevek has reconciled Pae, the shadow figure assumes a more

benign form (Man and His Symbols 119), and he is able to forget about him. Le

Guin’s decision to have Shevek abruptly and permanently reject Pae from his mind

may have been a result of her reading of the presence of benign animals in fairy tales:

Our instinct … is not blind. The animal does not reason, but it sees.

And it acts with certainty; it acts ‘rightly,’ appropriately. That is why

all animals are beautiful. It is the animal who knows the way, the

way home. It is the animal within us, the primitive, the dark brother,

the shadow soul, who is the guide … When you have followed the

animal instincts far enough, then they must be sacrificed, so that the

true self, the whole person, may step forth from the body of the

animal, reborn. (Language of the Night 67)

The alternative to reconciling with our Shadow is either to project our negative

characteristics onto others, or to become possessed by the Shadow. The first four

years that Shevek spends at Abbenay, for instance, sees Shevek under the control of

his own Shadow – “a collection of antisocial tendencies, his opposite or wicked self,

himself as self-hater and social rebel” (Lauter and Rupprecht 101), embodied by the

tyrant and parasite, Sabul. During those four years, Shevek lives in a room alone,

considers suicide, and Bedap describes him as a “revolutionary” (147). Le Guin

describes the destructive effect of being the controlled by one’s Shadow in her essay

‘The boy and his Shadow’ – her commentary on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1847

fairytale ‘The Shadow’:

When the shadow returns to the man in middle life, he has a second

chance. But he misses it, too. He confronts his dark self at last, but

instead of asserting equality or mastery, he lets it master him. He

gives in. He does, in fact, become the shadow’s shadow, and his fate

then is inevitable. The Princess Reason is cruel in having him

executed, and yet she is just. (Language of the Night 61)




Another text that features a protagonist’s allegorical anima (which I will later

explore) and Shadow is in the Orson Scott Card’s Ender Quartet, specifically the

1985 novel Ender’s Game. Ender Wiggin - the third child of a family in a futuristic

society that allows only two children per couple out of a need for population control

– has two siblings: an older brother, Peter, and an older sister Valentine. In an

endeavour to train a child to lead a fleet of star ships in retaliation against an alien

race, the military has its hopes set on Peter, the first-born. Peter however turns out to

be too ruthless. The military turn their attention to the second born, Valentine, yet

she turns out to be too compassionate. Still confident in Ender’s parents to raise a

candidate warrior, the military permit Peter and Valentine’s parents to exceed the

general quota of children and so they conceive Ender.

Using the same allegorical reading of Ender’s Game as with The Dispossessed, Peter

represents Ender’s shadow. To survive as a child, and a student at the battle school,

he must take out all stops in order to hold his own, and he manages this by

becoming increasingly like Peter. He does this to the extent of inadvertently killing

two other youths in self-defence, so to discourage further attacks.




Chapter 2: The Hero and Androgyny

Chapter 1 – The Hero and the Shadow – suggested an approach to reading

Speculative Fiction that adds to what might be exclusively an entertaining pass

time into an important therapeutic process. Literary Active Imagination encourages

readers to adopt a more disciplined approach to texts, where their emotive responses

are deconstructed and a more detailed appreciation of the roots of their responses is

developed. Using a similar process of introspection, empathizing with fictional and

literal bearers of those characteristics that may otherwise be stigmatized can help

readers develop themselves more fully, at the same time as humanizing and

personalizing victims of their own prejudices. Chapter 2 – The Hero and Androgyny

– suggests a similar method, whereby individuals can adopt characteristics of their

opposing sex regardless of social gender notions.

Androgyny

Heilbrun defines Androgyny as “a condition under which the characteristics of the

sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly

assigned” (x), while Stevenson suggests that “like sublimity, psychic androgyny –

the only kind worth writing about – is itself metaphysical, a transcendence of self and

sex in a moment of total otherness and integration.” (10) Androgyny has had an

appeal for the Ancient Greeks (Plato The Symposium 59), the romantic poets -

“The truth is, a great mind must be androgynous” (Collected Works of Samuel

Taylor Coleridge v.14:2; appendix H, par. 436) - and feminists from Woolf to the

present. Pearson and Pope for example suggest that the female’s journey culminates

in her ascension to androgyny:

… Having discovered that she has within her both male and female

attributes, the female hero discovers and affirms the full humanity

obscured by traditional sex roles. She learns to be autonomous and




to achieve without exploiting or dominating others; and she learns

nurturance that is not accompanied by a denial of the self. With the

achievement of this unified vision, the hero is prepared to return to

the kingdom and to enjoy a new relationship with the world. (218-9)

Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, which subscribes to a Social Constructionist view of

gender, suggests a much more dramatic form of Androgyny than Jung, who

subscribes to the Innate Difference view:

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a

vacillation from one sex the other takes place, and often it is only the

clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the

sex is the very opposite of what it is above. (121; emphasis added)

Sexual transformation, however, does not prevent the protagonist, Orlando, from

returning to being a ‘man’ – she now controls her gender, not by anything as radical

as transsexualism but simply transvestism, and thus enjoys “the love of both sexes

equally” (141). Like Shevek’s journey, Orlando’s journey may also be symbolic so

that Orlando, having realized that ‘clothes wear us’, wakes up one morning and

resolves to put on the appearance of a woman, and changes sex as easily as she

changes her clothes. The real change occurs within her mind, and reflects her own

sexual ambivalence. Sexuality, Woolf appears to argue, is a poor indicator of what

one’s gender should be.

Orlando and Jung concur that we can ‘break free’ of the sex that we were born with

and the gender that we may have grown quite used to after having it prescribed to us

for so long, and find our own destiny, adopting both masculine and feminine

qualities to suit our purpose. In isolation, and in their extremes, Orlando finds either

gender to be worth contempt (101-02), and that the harmony of Androgyny is the

preferable state. It is, both Jung and Woolf (205) argue, only through the

reconciliation of all gender- related characteristics of an individual that a fusion of

the self can be attained. In addition, just as Jung holds that only one who has




reconciled their contrasexual figure can look upon a person of the opposite sex

without projecting that contrasexual figure, Woolf suggests that it is only through

assuming the gendered-perspective of the other sex that we can begin to come to

understand, and forgive members of that sex (107).

For those who find Woolf’s analogous image of androgyny - “two people (male and

female) getting into a cab” (Room of One’s Own 95) - “more suggestive of inner

conflict than of harmony or integration” (Attebery 130), Jung’s model for a

relationship between the ego and the various psychic forces may be more appealing.

With Jung, one ‘deals’ with the unconscious (Joseph Campbell 130), neither

surrendering to it nor rejecting it (133), deciding which features of the contrasexual

figure and shadow one will draw from. This contrasts with Campbell whose highly

phallocentric model for the hero’s journey involves atonement with the Father (Hero

130) at the cost of their identity and their respect for the inner and outer woman.

Reconciliation with the Anima

Jung’s theory of the anima – “the feminine subpersonality of a male person”, is part

of his concept of contrasexuality – “that everyone has a biologically based opposite-

sexed personality derived from genetic traces of the other sex” (Cambridge

Companion to Jung 224). Jung’s concept of contrasexuality suggests “the potential

of each sex to develop the qualities and aspects of its opposite … through the

process of individuation,” allowing each sex to “integrate its opposite at a time in life

when reflection and personal creativity might be enhanced” (228). As noted by

Wehr, Lauter and Rupprecht, however, Jung’s concept of the contrasexual archetypes

the anima and the animus – which “became an essential feature of his description of

the differences between men and women” (Wehr 8) and are pivotal to my reading of

Androgyny in Jung and Le Guin’s work – are not equally defensible. While Jung

would have presumably formulated the concept of the anima from his own dream-

life, his explanation of the concept of the animus (CW 9:II, par. 27) is

“uncharacteristically deductive and conjectural” (Lauter and Rupprecht 8). Since




Jung’s concept of the animus resulted from speculation, his concept of the anima is

therefore more capable of holding up under scrutiny. Subsequently, in exploring

androgyny using the theories of Jung, it is better to maintain the same perspective,

albeit male, as Jung himself. This may mean that one can only use Jung to read male

characters and their means to androgyny.

Shevek is a thinker whose solitary existence heavily disillusions him. The

demoralizing impact of Sabul’s refusal to publish his work makes Shevek vulnerable

to his long-absent mother who tempts him with a Faustian bargain. Jung recognized

this meeting of negative archetypes as a complex-forming phenomenon:

As the male hero moves from the realm of the personal unconscious

down into the collective unconscious, the shadow changes sex,

merging alarmingly with his buried feminine self. The shadow and

anima together form a powerful ‘autonomous complex’ with Jung

calls the ‘dual mother’ or ‘terrible mother’. (Lauter and Rupprecht

102)

Rulag tempts Shevek to join the group that has learned to deal with people like Sabul

by playing with them (104). She also offers the security and guidance of the mother-

child bond. As Shevek’s mother, she was “the bearer of the first anima image” for

him (Rowland 34). Shevek refuses to join her yet his confrontation and subsequent

victory over his ‘terrible mother’ comes at a terrible emotional cost, and his decision

will haunt him. As much as he attempts to rebel against her, he remains her legacy

(132 and 147).

After leaving the hospital, Shevek attempts to reconnect with the social organism.

As he describes to Takver, his life has been a “‘trackless, feckless, fuckless waste

strewn with the bones of luckless wayfarers’” (150). His observation is a textbook

example of Jung’s theory that “the person for whom thinking was the dominant

function would eventually want to experience feeling and integrate that function into

the personality” (Lauter and Rupprecht 5).




However, something is missing. Between his encounter with Rulag and Takver,

Shevek attempts to reunite with humanity yet finally concedes that such an

enterprise, for him, is doomed. This suggests that a willingness to change, to “do

right” (130), is not sufficient. Rather, while we can decline possession by a malefic

anima, it is only by bonding with our “benevolent anima” (Man and his Symbols

188) that we can move on as much fuller people.

The refusal to join Rulag allows Shevek to hear Bedap, the herald of his

adventure, who arrives into his life briefly after his encounter with Rulag. Primed

and receptive to change, he eventually encounters Takver, drawn to him many years

ago by his eulogy for romantic love in a hedonistic society. Their conversation, four

days into their hike together, suggests he has come to an appreciation of the limits of

analysis and is attempting to balance Eros - the “principle of likeness and

relatedness” (Rowland 15; see also Cambridge Companion to Jung 316)) - with

Logos (Lauter and Supprecht 6). This suggests that he is ready for a reconciliation

with his benevolent anima, and so Shevek and Takver make their bond (149), and

Shevek is reborn (Lauter and Rupprecht 102). Read allegorically, Takver is Shevek’s

benevolent anima. Campbell and Rowland (228) refer to the forming of such a

union between Ego and Unconscious, or Same with Other, as the ‘Sacred Marriage’,

while Jung would describe the bond that Shevek and Takver form as the conunctio

where “male and female, conjoined … symbolize the birth of the new self” (Wehr

103). Shevek’s ‘discovery’ of Takver is the culmination of his coming to terms

with humanity, and signifies discovery of his Eros. He has come to believe that he

is, contrast to what he tells Gimar during the forestation project (44), a human being.

Shevek’s bond with Takver (152) allows him to become a father as well as

complete his life’s work (231), and this is consistent with Emma Jung’s description

of the anima (Emma Jung 46). Takver is in this regards Shevek’s Muse – the

unaccredited second author of his mathematical formulae. The sacred marriage also

allows him to extract the most valuable qualities of his time spent under Sabul’s

shadow: “The false starts and futilities of the past years proved themselves to be




groundwork, foundations, laid in the dark but well laid” (156).

The growing pressure of conformity, and the centralizing of power that Bedap has

witnessed on Anarres, gain a human face when Rulag returns to the scene as an

antagonist of the Syndicate of Initiative in the PDC meeting (291), and attempts to

intimidate Shevek into submission to the idea that “majority rule and might makes

right” (296). Having overcome sufficient obstacles, Shevek’s “‘feminine element’ no

longer appears … as a dragon, but as a woman” (Man and His Symbols 119).

Campbell associates the dragon with “Holdfast … the generation immediately

preceding that of the savior of the world” (Hero 352). Rulag is both Shevek’s would-

be matriarch and the maintainer of the status quo. Shevek ‘slays’ Rulag by telling

her that “‘No one who will not go as far as I’m willing to go has any right to stop me

from going’” (296), and then by travelling to Urras.

In challenging Rulag’s authority over the Syndicate of Initiative, as well as over his

own spirit, Shevek avoids possession by his malefic anima. He remains, as it were,

‘Dispossessed’. Instead, he attains unio mentalis – ‘the soul and the spirit are uniting’

(CW 14 par. 756). Considering that ‘anima’ means ‘soul’, and ‘animus’ means

‘spirit’, his Dragon Slaying suggests that his ego’s relationship with its anima is now

cemented, and Shevek has thus attained androgyny.

Card’s sequel to Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, highlights the importance of

reconciliation with the anima. Here begins the enduring theme of the Quartet: our

ability to share the universe. It is Ender’s life, after having inadvertently caused the

xenocide of the alien race by the human fleet he led, which tests his ability to

encourage others to coexist. His ‘Live and let live’ attitude, Jung would argue, is

attributable to his anima – represented, in the Quartet, by Valentine. It is

interesting to note that Valentine accompanies Ender in the settlement of the first

extra-Solar planet, leaving Peter who dies of old age during his sibling’s inter-stellar

journey during which, due to time dilation, they age but a few weeks. A Jungian

reading of Ender’s journey is that though he is able to reconcile his Shadow, the




challenge of his life will be to reconcile his anima.

Jung’s theories appear highly dedicated to the idea of an androgyny as a milestone

of individuation. In the process of reconciliation with various archetypal figures,

as demonstrated by Shevek in The Dispossessed, the hero should, for example –

regardless of their gender - assimilate their Shadow (a gender-neutral figure), their

anima (their feminine qualities) if they are a male, and their animas (their masculine

qualities) if they are a female. The Jungian hero strives for balance in their self-

gendering. On the face of it, heroism is, within the Jungian framework, accessible

for both men and women through an effectively identical course. Jung’s theories

factored in gender only so far as to counter societal-driven gendering, as he argued

that “the body intervenes in, but does not govern or determine, psychic identity”

(Rowland 36).

“Psychic identity” can be as powerful a collective force against the attainment of

Androgyny as the body. In The Dispossessed, political development during the

Anarres chapters of the novel suggests a movement away from moderate Eros to

extreme Logos – a movement with strong parallels to a move from sexual equality to

phallocentricism. Shevek, for instance, describes Anarresti society to the Urrasti

socialists as having lost its idealism (114). We also see the personal consequences of

this transition in the portrayal of Tirin, after he has been ostracized (270). Tirin’s

description shares strong parallels with Wehr’s portrayal of women as experiencing a

“‘death of the soul’ rather than physical death” because of their internalization of

society’s patriarchal view of them (17).

The cultural shift that takes place in Anarres suggests that within even a society that

has transcended androcentricism and whose members select characteristics

regardless of their sex, there remains the danger of masculine or feminine traits

being privileged over the other. Anarrasti society does not specifically target men or

women. Rather, those who hold a tendency towards either Eros or Logos counter to

their peers (such as Tirin and Shevek who clearly demonstrate Eros through their




high valuation of connectedness) come under attack. On Anarres it is as if sexism

has transcended sex. Perhaps ‘genderism’ would be a more appropriate term in its

place.




Chapter 3: The Hero and their Community

Chapter 2 – The hero and Androgyny – suggested a method by which individuals

could adopt characteristics of their opposing gender regardless of societal gender

notions. With similar Feminist sentiments, Chapter 3 – The Hero and their

Community – suggests a path that individuals can take in their own journey where

they value self- awareness over brute force. It is a journey where each experience

compounds, rather than revamps, their knowledge base, where they can be

reassured that their self- development benefits their peers as well as themselves, and

where their biological and symbolic parents and children are valuable contributors to

their lives.

Non-Linear models of time and the Journey feature prominently in critical feminist

work such as Jay Griffith’s Pip Pip, and Le Guin’s Earthsea where Ged’s journey

is constructed “in the form of a long spiral” (Language of the Night 51; see also

Bittner 61). Campbell’s circular model of the adventure (Hero 245) has been adapted

by Pearson and Pope in their construction of a key to the female hero’s journey.

The circle has also immense significance for Jung. According to Jung the mandala, or

circle, represents the Self: Jung refers to the mandala as the “archetype of wholeness”

(CW 9:I par. 715) and “the psychological expression of the totality of the self (par.

542). The object of the mandala is

the self in contradistinction to the ego, which is only the point of

reference for consciousness, whereas the self comprises the totality

of the psyche altogether, i.e. conscious and unconscious. (par. 717)

Jung also writes in his memoirs

The mandala is the centre. It is the exponent of all paths. It is the

path to the centre, to individuation.




… Between 1918 and 1920, I began to understand that the goal of

psychic development is the self. There is no linear evolution; there

is only a circumambulation of the self. Uniform development exists, at

most, only at the beginning … (Memories, Dream and Reflections 222)

The shape of the mandala and Campbell’s key tacitly suggests that it is through a

complete circumnavigation of the self that we can attain the Self. Yet sufficient

differences exist between Jung and Campbell (Joseph Campbell) suggests that

Campbell has misread or misrepresented Jung at numerous points in his

development of a model for the hero’s journey. This chapter highlights how

Shevek’s journey is more in accord with Jung’s model of individuation than

Campbell’s model of the hero’s journey. This chapter will also attempt to show that

Le Guin’s representation the hero’s journey challenges Campbell’s model of

individuation. This chapter also formulates an adaptation of Campbell’s Key to the

hero’s journey that adequately represent the structure and themes of The

Dispossessed and related stories.

Vision and Truth

It is important to note that Shevek sees Takver a number of times at Abbenay

before engaging with her. This most poignantly occurs after his confrontation with

Sabul.

He thought about the Northsetting Institute and the party the night

before he left. It seemed very long ago now, and so childishly

peaceful and secure that he could have wept in nostalgia. As he

passed under the porch of the Life Sciences building a girl passing

looked sidelong at him, and he thought that she looked like that girl,

what was her name, the one with short hair, who had eaten so

many fried cakes the night of the party. He stopped and turned, but

the girl was gone … (99-100)




Clearly, Shevek requires the correct ‘vision’ to be able to appreciate his benevolent

anima. It is the growing of the third eye, marked in the case of Shevek by his

encounter with Takver at the beginning of the hike into the mountains, which is the

greater boon of the hero. For while traditional heroes such as those generally

portrayed by Campbell in Hero appear concerned with gaining power to magnify

their actions, authors of feminist models of the hero create characters who gain

insight into the use of power they already possess. Rather than bigger muscles,

Pearson and Pope concur; the hero – female or male – should strive for a

broadening of their mind.

An exploration of the heroic journeys of women – and of men who are

relatively powerless because of class or race – makes clear that the

archetypal hero masters the world by understanding it, not by

dominating, controlling, or owning the world or other people.

Even works about privileged male heroes, especially works in the

romantic or transcendental tradition, frequently express ambivalence

about the macho ideal of heroism … Ishmael (In Herman Melville’s

Moby Dick) observes [Ahab’s] arrogant and destructive behaviour and

learns from it, and his triumph ultimately comes not through

attempting to control the world, but through understanding himself to

be part of its natural processes. (4-5)

While male hero journeys are concerned with gaining strength through communion

with an omnipotent god, female hero journeys are often about communion with an

omniscient god. Through spontaneous ceremony and self-initiation rather than a

“heroic endeavour”, we can achieve greater understanding of the ego and self-

knowledge (Shorter 12). Gaining the third eye also allows us to meet the eyes of the

other.

[Takver] had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in

her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the




experience of existence outside the human boundary. Takver would

have known how to look back at that eye in the darkness under the

trees. (22)

Other characters who have balanced their gendered-characteristics also appear to

have a significant respect, like Shevek (Rochelle 44), for truth. In A Long way from

Verona, Jessica Vye is adamant about standing by her portrayal of her tea party,

which a teacher accuses her of manufacturing. In Mononoke-Hime, Ashitaka – a

young champion with a strong sense of justice – makes it clear to Eboshi Gozen that

he will “see with eyes unclouded”.

In Woolf’s Orlando, three metaphysical figures, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty, visit

the sleeping protagonist. However, trumpets blare forth “‘The Truth and Nothing but

the Truth’”, forcing the grieving personified virtues to retreat (86-7). This scene can

be read that Orlando, who upon the cusp of waking up as a woman, is offered the

choice of adopting the conventional attributes of a woman – or, to remain faithful to

who he is regardless of sex, and continue being a poet: slayer of illusions. Both

Woolf’s Orlando (112) and Le Guin’s Shevek share a respect for the truth, for

fidelity to their feelings, fidelity to their ideals, and a sense of a great-untold truth.

Upon Orlando’s marriage, she becomes conscious that it is no longer ‘proper’ for

her to be a poet – “If one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to

write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.” (173). Yet Orlando propels

herself forward into writing - or ‘truth telling’ – and this becomes the antidote to

the social expectation that she be a ‘properly’ married woman. This is similar to

Shevek trying to find harmony between his writing and his relationship with Takver:

“Although [Takver’s] existence was necessary to Shevek her actual presence could

be a distraction.” (156)

Shevek also demonstrates the feminist privileging of perception over power




through his process of overcoming Pae, his Shadow – rather than “picking

something up and throwing it after Pae” (228) after finding that he has been

restricted to the University grounds, Shevek considers what he can best extract from

Pae.

Of the above texts mentioned, Orlando specifically suggests a strong correlation

between Androgyny and fidelity to the truth. An individual who has attained psychic

androgyny needs to have lost the sense of shame that would otherwise allow

socially prescribed notions of gender to influence their self-perception. Instead, they

need to value above all things their own perception – to recognize that the emperor

has no clothes on and, perhaps, that he is in fact a woman.

Ego and the Unconscious

While the majority of those on Anarres share strong similarities to a Campbellian

model of the journey – finite and closed – Shevek appears comparable to the Jungian

model of individuation, asserting and developing his own ego rather than allowing

his ego to “abandon itself to the unconscious.” The advantage of the ego is its

mobility – the ego is “the subject of consciousness … It is the ego that leaves behind

the world of everyday consciousness and discovers the new world of the

unconscious” (Segal 19). It is his strong ego that allows Shevek to travel from

Anarres to Urras, and back again – symbolically, to rise and fall through strata of

consciousness, to be master of the two worlds and have “freedom to pass back and

forth across the world division” (Hero 229). The strength of Shevek’s ego also drives

his journey to individuation, on Anarres as well as Urras, causing him to live

nomadically, dwelling only briefly at any one place or with any one group.

While for Campbell, the “effective annihilation of the human ego was accomplished

and society achieved a cohesive organization” (390)




The Jungian ideal is the establishment of a balance between the ego

and the unconscious: just as the ego should not sever its ties to the

unconscious, so it should not abandon itself to the unconscious. The

ego gets supplemented, not replaced, by the self. Indeed, the ego

remains the center of consciousness. (Segal 19-20)

The Self – the “totality of the psyche” (Cambridge Companion to Jung 318) – makes

up for a deficiency in the ego. In the process of attaining selfhood then, the ego

compounds rather than revamps. Le Guin’s Four Ways to Forgiveness expresses

this sentiment in the context of truth.

‘I have seen a picture,’ Havzhiva went on. ‘Lines and colors made

with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is

local, all truth is partial … No truth can make another truth untrue. All

knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color.

Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing

the part as the whole.’ (160)

Havzhiva is referring to truth, using the analogy of a mandala that he has seen, to a

tribal elder – the Chosen - who fears that the move towards equality across the sexes

will mean the end of all their tradition and cultural identity. Havzhiva grew up in

an isolated, highly spiritual community only to find that beyond the lands of his

town existed the cities of an intergalactic civilization whose ancestral roots he

shared. Therefore, his reassurance to the Chosen is from the heart – the future will

not negate the past but rather supplement it. In reference to Havzhiva’s approach to

reconciling his personal experiences, parallels can thus be drawn between Jung’s

attitude towards the endurance of the ego, and Le Guin’s development of her hero

protagonists, be it Havzhiva or Shevek. The hero’s epiphanies on their path of self-

discovery and self- development do not negate but rather enhance their prior self.

Jung’s respect for the continuity of the ego, as demonstrated above, should reassure

Wehr that Jung’s path of individuation does not endanger women whose egos are




already underdeveloped because of patriarchal intimidation, and “are tacitly and

explicitly discouraged from gratifying their own needs or seeking fulfilment of their

own desires.” (100-1)

Shevek’s symbolic deaths are an effective method of simulating the experience of

ego- annihilation, and subsequently personal growth, without an actual surrendering

of the ego. Living and dying through his admirable peers proves to be an effective

means for Shevek to develop himself. In watching the people he cares for die or

suffer, he is, in Jungian terms, watching the sacrifice of his “hero ideal”:

If a man has a good brain, thinking becomes his hero and, instead

of Christ, Kang, or Berson, becomes his ideal. If you give up his

thinking, this hero ideal, you commit a secret murder – that is, you

give up your superior function. (Jung Analytical Psychology 48)

Jung explains that the sacrifice of the hero ideal is necessary

In order that a new adaptation can be made; in short, it is connected

with the sacrifice of the superior functions in order to get at the

libido necessary to activate the inferior functions (48).

Each death that takes place in The Dispossessed causes Shevek immense suffering,

yet each leads to an awakening and retrospection - as Shevek explains to Takver,

“‘The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.’” (158) In

these symbolic deaths that mark the achievement of his maturity (Man and His

Symbols 123), he is able to reflect upon and judge the earlier stages of his life, such

as Gvarab’s memorial service when he criticizes himself for the three years he’s

‘wasted’ at Abbenay (135). At each death, there is a rebirth, both in Shevek and

through Shevek - considering that the recounting of the air accident during the

forestation project and his deduction that suffering is inevitable deeply influence

Takver and Bedap (54).




The most significant and visible symbolic death that takes place in the novel occurs

during the early stages of the forestation project. Shevek is frustrated that

mindless labour claims the time that otherwise could be occupied by intellectual

work. Yet in the forestation project, he is able to engage his physical self: building

up his strength, connecting with rage, understanding the nature of suffering and

rejection, as well as becoming well versed in sex, are all the benefits that develop

from ceasing to waste “his brain on code-messages and his semen on wet dreams”

(49). His “inferior functions” proceed to serve him well later by helping him avoid

being the subject of Takver’s contempt (154). Moreover, it is by moving away from

his overly intellectual (48) childhood friends, and connecting with a woman and his

planet, that he is able to start to coherently form an idea of what he wants to research

and study.

The ‘murder’ of Shevek’s higher-functions resumes however when Takver and he

split up during the drought: the expectation at Elbow is that he will not stop to think

what it means to be fed while another is not, and to ignore those dying around him.

His sense of compassion is being “murdered” by his community (Analytical

Psychology 48). While he tolerated the earlier death of his heroic ideal because of

“how proud you felt of what you got done this way, all together – what satisfaction it

gave” (43-4), he walks away from Elbow because he is being asked to give up too

much in return for too little. This point marks the beginning of his attempts to break

free of the unconscious.

The Anarresti, by refusing to return, indicate that they have surrendered to the

unconscious - in this case, the collective unconscious often demonstrated during the

Anarresti chapters. Maedda, a young woman in Old Town on Urras, shows that

Anarres is the site of the dissolution of the ego: “Do you know that when people

here want to wish each other luck they say, ‘May you get reborn on Anarres!’”

(243). Too often, Maedda’s perception is an accurate reflection - the Anarresti,

having been “absorbed” into the group mind – the collective unconscious - do not

think for themselves. Segal notes the appeal of dissolution.




The strongest temptation is the prospect of returning to one’s original

state: the state of absorption in the cosmos … The temptation is to

surrender oneself to it and thereby to lose the responsibility entailed

by individuality. (19)

Shevek’s first trip into space illustrates this temptation, where death becomes

synonymous with dissolution.

He was clearly aware of only one thing, his own total isolation. The

world had fallen out from under him, and he was left alone.

He had always feared that this would happen, more than he had

ever feared death. To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He

had kept himself, and lost the rest. (9)

Shevek describes the Anarresi as sons born in exile, (76) denoting that their

collective journey is incomplete. If Shevek were to fail to acknowledge his roots

and return to Urras, and then back again to Anarres, it “would mean [his] utter

failure, not his success: it would mean his failure to break free of the unconscious.”

(Segal 21)

The Community

As impressive as the parallels between Campbell’s key and the mandala are,

however, it is difficult and indeed impractical to consider the hero in isolation from

their community. Shevek’s journey, as Rochelle notes, embodies many other people.

Shevek … is on a Quest like the traditional Monomyth heroes. But he

is seeking a double grail, which intertwines the personal and the

public, the scientific and the social. (44)

Shevek’s journey is a cultural event. He redeems his world, as Campbell would

explain, by virtue of being a hero yet he also actively participates in his society’s




mythology by playing the Prison Guard, the Beggarman, and finally enabling

Ketho to play the Capitalist. Firstly, this highlights that Shevek is continuing

Tirin’s work, which emphasizes the hero as role. It is at Elbow that Shevek takes the

torch from Tirin (269), because Tirin himself is no longer capable of carrying it.

Shevek leaves his post and reunites with Takver not only out of refusal to write lists

of who was fed and who did not – he leaves because he sees how the social organism

had destroyed his childhood friend. By taking the torch from Tirin and travelling to

Urras, Shevek is myth building – adopting the figure of the Beggarman and, like a

contemporary actor with an ancient script, re-interpreting that figure and recasting the

mold.

The symbolic and vicarious deaths experienced by the hero, illustrate that Shevek is

living through his community, taking their deaths personally – the same blood that

runs through his ammari runs through him. Shevek is also an expression of his

community. Though he travels solo, his journey is a collective project with the

community travelling inside him. While on Urras, for instance, Shevek thinks of

Rulag, Sabul, and Takver in terms of their virtues and vices. He wishes he had the

empathy of Takver when he sees the horse; looking into a mirror, he realizes how

much he looks like Rulag when he puts on a suit; he acknowledges that his socially

encouraged single- mindedness at the A-Io University is reminiscent of Sabul; and

he sees that Oiie’s interaction with his children and wife is almost identical to

Shevek’s interaction with his own children (123). Reading this allegorically, these

cases collectively suggest that Shevek carries with him the archetypal figures – read

literally, they suggest that Shevek is carrying the essence of his community within

him. Shevek’s reconciliation and assimilation of the Beggarman, and the anima and

shadow archetypes also indicates the hero’s ability to draw from the collective

unconscious – the wellspring of his people’s culture.

Shevek may be eternally egotistical, thinking always of the right of the individual to

self-determination (295), and travels to Urras in order to do the work that he cannot

do while on Anarras, yet his journey, driven by self-interest, helps cross-pollinate the




two planets. Thus, he facilitates both his personal growth and the growth of his

community. In contrast to Campbell’s closing words in Hero with a Thousand

Faces, it is society that guides and saves our creative hero Shevek - the last

glimpse we have of Shevek is not of him experiencing the “silences of his personal

despair” (391) but celebrating his imminent return to Anarres as a whole being

(319). Rather than carrying “the cross of the redeemer” (Hero 391), Shevek’s hands

are empty, “as they had always been” (319).

Passing the Torch

After concluding his quest, Campbell’s hero appears obliged to slay his father

(Hero 349), contradicting the necessary stage of Atonement with the Father (130).

Campbell fails also to provide a reason for having faith in a father who could just as

easily be a Bluebeard (Estes 43) as compassionate guardian, just as easily a Sabul as

a Palat, and just as easily a product of Urras as Anarres.

Campbell’s argument can teach us that the hero must be constantly constructive or

else become destructive (Hero 338n.21) when insufficiently engaged. What sets the

lasting hero apart from the demon is the practice of creativity. The hero can ensure

that they do not succumb to stasis, entropy, and decay (see Sullivan), which are

sustainable only through cannibalism (Hero 337), by taking on a student to guide and

not possess.

Not only does the child need a mentor as a role model of the virtues

that he or she hopes to activate from the unconscious, but the adult

also benefits from the nurturing relationship that allows him or her to

get in touch with promptings of the unconscious. [Through the

mentorship] Children may cultivate their underdeveloped faculties of

introversion, sensation, and, thinking, while adults may discover their

latent potential for extraversion, intuition, and feeling. (Byrnes 43-56)

This occurs with Shevek’s relationship with Ketho: upon his journey on the Terran




star ship to Anarres, the story no longer concerns Shevek. He is a ‘Senex’ – “a person

of any age who is at the end of a developmental process” (Levinson 211). His journey

has finished, and another’s is yet to begin: that person is Ketho, Shevek’s new

apprentice, or ‘Peur’ - “a person of any age who is at the start of a developmental

process” (211). Ketho’s fate is to try Anarchy out for himself and so he descends into

the ‘underworld’ of Anarres, turning Shevek’s world of innocence into the world of

experience. Shevek, as a mentor-figure, appears in Ketho’s life “where insight,

understanding, good advice, determination, planning etc. are needed but cannot be

mustered on [his] own resources” (Jung Archetype 216). While Ketho will take

Shevek down to Abbenay Space Port in the landing craft (315), Shevek will

become his guide the moment that Ketho steps onto Anarres.

A culture that values a system of mentoring, by ranking spirit guide figures higher

than heroism, encourages individuals to adopt an apprentice and become teachers

(Rochelle 109) and helps avoid the appearance of the nemesis: the ‘fully grown’ hero

(Richie).

If the protagonist’s journey is structured, as Le Guin does, so that they become spirit

guides instead of an Ogre, a vicious cycle of successors to would-be Ogres slaying

their infanticidal fathers may be broken. Just as Shevek is mentored, albeit briefly,

by his father, Palat, who introduces to him the logarithm tables (30) so too does

Shevek act as mentor and guide to Ketho, the Hainishman, to Anarres and its

culture. Palat provides the first step to Shevek’s quest to break through barriers, to

reconnect with his past - while Shevek provides for Ketho and the whole of the

Hainish league the chance for a future (287). This need is highlighted by Le Guin’s

inversion of Byrnes’ stereotype of the introverted elder and extraverted youth in the

mentorship of the forty-year old Shevek and the thirty year-old (315) Ketho: Shevek

laughs, while it is Ketho, indicative of his race the Hainish, who is “old before their

time” (Byrnes 48).

Yet just as Shevek passes the torch to Ketho, so too does Shevek receive the torch




from Odo, the philosophical founder of Anarres, who becomes the focus of Le

Guin’s prequel to The Dispossessed in the short story ‘The Day before the

Revolution’. Shevek is the word of Odo made flesh (244), and his presence on

Anarres can be said to represent Odo’s metaphysical journey to the moon. Yet he is

also Odo’s ‘son’, born in exile, yet opting to make a kind of return – and so his

journey to Urras completes Odo’s journey.

An additional journey is available for inclusion considering that Odo did more than

simply initiate the Odonian movement which is realized through the settlement on

Anarres, but lived her own life parallel to the discontents in Omelas. It is also

necessary to recognize the sacrifices Odo makes: her period in prison where she

produces the work that subsequently becomes the elixir of her followers, the loss of

her husband, and her stroke (Le Guin Winds Twelve Quarters 301).

The Spiral-Shaped Journey

The proposed model for the hero’s journey that follows embodies the idea that the

community’s heroism is a single strand that runs through the ages, yet made up of

individuals attaining Selfhood. This key, shaped like a spiral, portrays heroism as a

role adopted by individuals of each generation, with each individual’s journey being

both a continuation of their community’s previous hero, and a prelude to the

subsequent hero. The spiral key is open, outward looking, and suggests an

interdependent relationship between the generations of heroes. Odo and Ketho are

important in including in a representation of Shevek’s journey as they reflect the

important role that the inter-generational, and even interplanetary and interstellar

community plays in enabling Shevek’s self-realization. Including Ketho also

highlights the important role that accepting apprentices plays in offering an

alternative to Campbell’s argument that heroes are required to usurp their father’s

throne, and in time to be usurped themselves by their heir.

The presence of Odo and Ketho as participants in the same narrative as Shevek,




however, raises issues regarding subject-position – from whose position is the story

to be told when one person’s underworld is another person’s home? (This is an

important consideration in The Teachings of Don Juan, which highlights the lack of

distinction made by a Native American shaman, between consensual reality and the

supernatural realm, or Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest, where the

indigenous people of an exploited planet do not privilege waking over dreaming.)

Because of Tirin’s observation on the hill that “‘Our earth is their Moon; our Moon

is their earth’” (37), and the challenge to view Shevek’s life on the planet of Anarres

as Odo living on her planet’s ‘moon’, both Shevek and Ketho’s journeys could be

said to take place in their respective ‘underworlds’. Consequently, Campbell’s

horizontal line strictly delineating the ‘threshold of adventure’ is redundant. The

spiral key will include a marking of the times in the individual’s life spent

immersed in the unconscious realm, or within the unconscious, yet since Jung, unlike

Freud, refused to privilege the ego over the unconscious, the location of the hero’s

journey into the underworld will not be specifically located in the underside of the

spiral.

Lack of closure is a narrative feature of The Dispossessed as well as a thematic

feature, with Shevek’s emphases that the revolution must have no end, lest it never

have started (185). Presence of arrows at head and tail of the spiral, suggesting

infinite extension in either direction, draws attention to this open-endedness.

It is tempting to set up players in a discourse as binaries - for example Freud versus

Jung in Psychology, or Campbell versus Pearson and Pope in Comparative

Mythology. Yet it is by no means reasonable to separate the intertwined histories of

the above critics. Just as Jung rebelled against Freud, Pearson and Pope rebelled

against Campbell, and the remnants of the predecessors’ legacy live on in the

reactionary results of the rebellion.

To argue that Jung and Campbell are at opposite ends of the spectrum in regards to

portrayals of the ego’s journey towards Self is appealing yet faulty. Instead,




Campbell has created a dual-product of Jung and Freud’s schools of Psychology.

Likewise, though it would be satisfying to proclaim that Pearson and Pope’s hero

has ‘matured’ to fit in to the twenty-first century, the truth appears to resemble more

that Pearson and Pope have created a model of the female hero that accommodates

the narratives of female characters and to balance out Campbell’s phallocentric

model of the hero. The structure of the hero’s journey remains circular – only the

hero’s gender has changed to protect the critics who fear to venture into a territory of

androgynies.

Reconciliation with the Persona

In The Dispossessed, there are three noteworthy attempts by Shevek and his peers

while on Anarres to reconnect publicly with their cultural and archetypal roots. In

Jungian terms, this takes place through the deliberate, calculated, and temporary

assumption of a persona, or public mask. The first is when Shevek and his friends

enter the mindset of a prison guard with Tirin and Givesh when they lock up Kadagv

(31-7), and then Shevek insists that they release him not out of respect for Kadagv

but out of respect for himself. This experience informs the rest of Shevek’s life,

explaining his phobia of locked doors, and his desire to pull down the invisible walls

separating people and races. The second is when Tirin dresses up as the Beggarman

at Shevek’s farewell party, crying “‘Bay me, bay me for just a little money …’” (51).

The third is when Tirin goes on to extend his stage skills in isolation, producing a

satirical play about a capitalist coming to Anarres. (269)

Shevek personally and consciously rejects imprisonment and scapegoating for

himself by playing the prison guard. In Jungian terms, Shevek’s actions could be read

as reviving latent archetypes in order to discard them. He sees his culture’s past,

acknowledges it, and turns away, never needing to return; when given the

opportunity to go to the decommissioned prison that held Odo on Urras, he

declines, knowing “what a prison cell was like.” (75)




Tirin is, by contrast, adventurous in his experimentation of theatre, and unlike

Shevek, makes his findings (as he plays on the edge of Anarresti culture) public:

writing and performing the play of a capitalist coming to Anarres. This play actively

and verbally satirizes the Anarresian fear of invasion – a fear that remains unvoiced

in the novel except by those who wish to play on racism, such as Rulag. Tirin’s play

mocks the notion that Abbenay could be effectively invaded and Odonian society

undermined. As Bedap comments in the PDC meeting, having an open door policy

with Urras says to the Urrasti and to themselves that they are strong enough to face

the capitalists as equals (293). Yet Tirin’s attempt to reinforce his peers’ sense of

community strength and integrity comes is received as an insult and he is

subsequently ostracized.

This suggests that as well as myth being a medium for a culture to express its

repressed nature (Knapp 7) and for that repressed nature to be resurrected, it is also

an opportunity to reconcile with our shadow, to name our dark side, our forgotten

or misinterpreted history, and our fears. Moreover, having named our Shadow we

can subsequently control it. Shevek has the fail-safe within him since the prison-

guard play-acting, that will prevent him from ever tolerating luxury and comfort at

the expense of another, while Tirin’s play begins to bring down walls, reassuring the

Anarresi that they need not fear their home planet.

Yet the practice of persona-assumption by Shevek takes on a more serious tone, and

the stakes become bigger, during his time on Urras. While as a child on Anarres

Shevek is trying to fit in with the demands of society, on Urras he is using play as a

“means of assimilating the world, making sense of their experience in order to

make it part of [himself]” (McMahon 2). In going to Urras, Shevek re-enacts Tirin’s

play-acting of the “Poor Urrasti, the Beggarman” (51). Shevek appears to be

attempting to recapture the fun and playfulness of youth but not relating completely

to his own youth. Instead, he is trying to resurrect the Tirin that he knew when they

were both nineteen years of age. The level of energy that both Tirin and Shevek

possessed in their late teens is in sharp contrast to their state preceding Shevek’s




departure to Abbenay – Tirin is broken by the reaction to his play (270), and Shevek

(301) is working towards regaining the level of independence he possessed as an 18

year old – “Uninfluenced by others” (51). He is pretending to be Tirin pretending to

be an Urrasi.

By calling himself the Beggarman, Shevek is able to think as an Urrasi. Shevek

experiments: he tries meat; he tries alcohol; he tries shopping; he tries being a tourist;

and he tries to initiate an affair. Each attempt fails but it is in this play-acting, this

attempt at empathy, that he comes closer to both his racial Shadow and his personal

Shadow. While on Urras, Shevek begins to adopt the characteristics of the

negative figures on Anarres – for instance, while studying furiously in his room at

the University “It occurred to him that he was getting to be like Sabul … possessive

and secretive. A psychopathy on Anarres was rational behaviour on Urras” (229).

And -

He scowled at the touch, straightened up, and turned away from the

mirror; but not before he had been forced to see that, thus clothed,

his resemblance to his mother, Rulag, was stronger than ever (111).

Shevek accumulates money, clothes for himself, chocolates for Vea, colour

photographs for Pilun (173), and the scraps of paper with theory written on them.

Each experiment concludes with a reflection on the value of each of the ‘exercises’:

he takes what he can from the experience, and rejects the rest.

Having played the Beggarman, he tacitly repeats Tirin’s words – “‘Bay me! Bay

me!’” (51) - And he is bought. An aspect of his ‘play therapy’ on Urras is

pretending that he “both imagines and practices being in control” (McMahon 2),

which he eventually learns is not the case – “They owned him. He had thought to

bargain with them, a very naïve notion” (225). Yet it is an illusion that serves its

purpose, allowing him to leisurely experiment with being an A-Iotian. The

University in A-Io becomes a ‘playground’ provided to him by the parent-like

government to “protect (him) from intrusions from the outside world” (McMahon




2). When Shevek realizes that the game he is playing is a deadly political one, he is

able to break out of the playground.

In addition, just as he earlier accumulates objects, he begins surrendering them.

When he escapes from his room and the University by taxi, he leaves all the

clothes except those he is wearing. He runs into a drunken beggar and gives him all

the money he has. We can assume that he gives the scraps of paper to Keng to

transmit to all of the Ekumen, and on the Terran space ship on the way to Anarres

he laments that he does not have the photo of the sheep with him (319) to give his

daughter. He gradually strips himself until all he has are empty hands. This is in

contrast to Atro who says to Shevek regarding the League of Worlds, “We should

come in like noblemen, with a great gift in our hands.” (120)

Shevek’s time on Urras, and the fact that he returns to tell his tale challenges the

Anarresi myth of the Beggarman. Shevek proves that Anarresi can travel to Urras

and return as an Anarresi, unconverted. Though the A-Iotian government manages to

own him, this is temporary (225). Unlike the Poor Urrasti of Anarresi mythology that

Tirin plays (51), Shevek does not go to Urras with the intention to sell himself, for

them to ‘bay’ him. When Shevek asks himself, “Having locked himself in jail, how

might he act as a free man?” (225), he is clearly revoking his self-appointed role as

the Beggarman, and has changed back to the more familiar role of the Anarchist.

Tirin’s case, on the other hand, highlights the importance of being able to

distinguish the ego from the persona, in order to avoid persona possession. When an

individual lives out the community’s Shadow, he or she becomes the canvas on which

the community members project their collective dark side – the receiver of

Shadow projection. Tirin falls victim to the temptation to play the victim, or

‘Scapegoat’, and consequently he is sent off into the ‘wilderness’.

Shevek, having shed the mask of the Beggarman, escapes the University. His

subsequent journey to Joking Lane (239) is a trek into history, into aged depths –




symbolically into A-Io’s aged unconscious: in Old Town, the shops and people are

run- down; the guide to his destination is the owner of a Pawnshop (241) selling used

goods; and the refuge from the riot-police is in a “basement under a used-furniture

store” (245). Shevek here is reminiscent of Euripides’ play The Bacchants, where a

personified Dionysus walks the streets of Thebes, a city whose “anima is unintegrated

[having been] rejected by the ruling conscious order …” (Knapp 6) – the side hidden

from Shevek by his keepers. Yet he himself has been incapable of entering the maze-

like corridors of A- Io’s old capital until now, for the labyrinth represents the

unconscious and only a highly developed individual can make their way through

(Man and His Symbols 118). That Shevek finds the representative of the Syndicates

and Socialist Workers in ‘Joking Lane’ suggests that the Urrasi psyche is still in the

Trickster’s stage, still immature but striving to ascend to some greater level of self

(Man and His Symbols 103; For more information on the Trickster figure, refer to

CW 9:I par. 456-88).

During and after the rally, Shevek is involved in and privy to an internal

dialogue with the mind of the A-Iotian capital. During the rally there is singing

(246); Shevek speaks (247-8); the helicopters come shouting “the meaningless word”

(248); a protestor writes “DOWN” in “broad-smears of blood” (249) – later the

“word was washed off the wall … but it remained; it had been spoken; it had

meaning.” From the basement, hiding from the police, Shevek hears “Soldiers giving

orders to each other” (251). Finally, there is silence – “a silence of death” (253). This

dialogue is between A-Io’s conscious (the ‘owners’) and unconscious (the people of

Old Town). When the unconscious attempts to speak out coherently, a shout silences

it instantly.

Shevek escapes from the capital and seeks refuge in the moat-girt Terran Embassy

(277). Since “Water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious” (Archetype 18),

the crossing of the moat marks the end of Shevek’s journey into his unconscious,

which began when he and Takver made the bond beside the running river (149).

Shevek’s life work is complete and he is free to return home.




Conclusion

Literary Active Imagination implies an introspective, psychological reading of a

text, where our role is to use the text as a mirror to ourselves, rather than a window

into the author. This suggests a new mode of literary criticism that surrenders any

desire of understanding the mind of the writer, and leaves the literary critic with the

task of using the text to understand themselves.

I encourage an approach to reading that is receptive to characteristics of

protagonists and themes of the text that do not abide by existing conventions such as

those offered by Campbell. In the analysis of how The Dispossessed encourages a

revaluation of the Monomyth, I show that Le Guin’s ‘romance’ of Jungian and

Feminist concepts is able to transcend Campbell. It is my hope that I have presented

a model of the hero’s journey that can accommodate female and male heroes equally,

and inspire men and women to equal degrees.

I also encourage criticism of strongly thematic fictional texts to focus on the schools

of thought that are known to have strongly inspired, or can be seen to strongly

resemble, the ideas pertaining to the author of the fictional text. By showing a school

of thought ‘at work’, we can gain a better understanding of the ideology. A benefit

of a Jungian reading unexplored in these pages is an analysis of the process of

male projection of notions of womanhood and the feminine onto women, as well as

female projections of notions of manhood and the masculine onto men. Yet more

pertinently and outside the Jungian mind-space, is that the notion of projection and

possession provide us with a rewarding inside perspective of how a man, Jung, and

his male and female followers, the Jungians, perceived, explained, and rationalized

gender as patriarchal subjects. Whether Jung’s theories are archaic or not, a

reading of the Jungian or Jung-like features of a novel highlight how his ideas have

permeated modern writing, and have had a lingering influence on views on human

nature.




Appendix - Synopsis

While it is my hope that my arguments within these pages do not require a thorough

understanding of The Dispossessed, I have provided the below synopsis of Le Guin’s

novel for where my intentions have not translated into reality. For the sake of clarity,

the following synopsis of The Dispossessed will be presented in the chronological

order of Shevek’s life, rather than the actual order of the chapters that alternate

between Shevek’s early life on Anarres with the period he spends on Urras in his later

life. However, the original structure carries immense dramatic importance by

allowing a constant juxtaposition between features of the two societies.

A novel that utilizes a very similar structure to the juxtaposition in The Dispossessed

between Urras and Anarres is Marge Piercy’s 1976 utopian text Woman on the Edge

of Time. This novel follows Connie Ramos’ incarceration at a mental hospital, where

she sporadically blacks out and inadvertently astral-projects herself into the future

amongst the members of a Utopian community. These juxtapositions help highlight

the inadequacies of contemporary forms of helping people find psychic harmony. In

the present, a society that assumes the right to ‘fix’ Connie misdiagnoses her and

locks her up. The people of the future society, however, attaches no stigma to

psychological imbalance – instead, the peers of those who proclaim themselves mad

provide them with the time and support to engage in what appears to be a vision quest

to heal them.

Chapter 2 (25-54)

A baby sits in a nursery cot. The father Palat confers with the matron, explaining

that the mother, Rulag, has accepted a job on Anarres’ capital Abbenay leaving the

child with Palat. As the father and matron watch on, the child refuses to allow

another baby to experience the warm column of light he has found in the centre of

the room – earning him a chastisement from the matron, and he is moved away




from the warm light. The enraged, propertarian infant subsequently burst into tears.

This is Shevek – our hero.

Four boys, including Shevek, Tirin and Bedap, aged in their mid-teens, seek refuge

from the suffocating presence of women on a hill beside the Northsetting Regional

Institute. Above them floats the sister-planet, Urras.

The night before Shevek is due to depart to Abbenay to further his studies, his

classmates hold a party in his honour. Touched by the number of people who turn

up, there is great merriness, small instances of gluttony, performances, and

reflection. Tirin, Bedap, Shevek, and Takver – now just a woman with a crumb on

her chin – discuss suffering. ‘Brotherhood’ – Shevek argues – ‘Begins in shared

pain.’ ‘Where does it end?’ another asks. However, he cannot answer – yet.

Chapter 4 (78-105)

At the Institute in Abbenay, he finds the truth of the warning from his former

lecturer that his Physics supervisor will try to possess him: Sabul claims credit for

the work that Shevek writes, and censors what he doesn’t like. This leads to a quiet

confrontation where Shevek brings to light the hypocrisy of Sabul. “His (Shevek’s)

gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance he

was indominitable.”

While Shevek wins the battle against Sabul, he departs aware that he has lost the war.

Dismayed, he marches back to his dorm in the rain. He passes Takver, yet she

disappears before he can call out her name. The following day, after a night of

torturous fever, he drags himself to the local clinic to be diagnosed with pneumonia.

There, after recovering, he meets Rulag, the mother, and she gives him a tempting

invitation: to gain, from her, the skills and resources necessary to play against Sabul

in his own game. Yet, fiercely loyal to the memory of his late father, and for himself

– both deserted by Rulag – he declines, and is left to his own sorrow, and loneliness.




Chapter 6 (129-59)

After rejecting Rulag from his life, and finding his profession dissatisfying, Shevek

attempts to make a connection with others - concerts, work groups, social groups,

academics, the opposite sex. Bedap appears (131) - catalyst to his adventure.

Shevek begins to awaken. Shevek meets Takver on a hike; they fall in love, and

soon move in together.

Chapter 8 (194-223)

The drought is likely to last for several more years. With Takver drawn to the coast

with the child Sadik, Shevek tries to continue his physics research. Against

Shevek’s clear conviction of the value of his work, however, Sabul ejects him from

the institute. Cast adrift, Shevek leaves the city to join the growing effort to help

alleviate the pressures of the drought, unaware of when he will again see his family.

Chapter 10 (254-76)

After running into his childhood friend, Tirin, broken by the social organism and

working as a janitor, Shevek abandons his post and reunites with his family. They

have been apart for four years – yet the bond is as strong as ever.

Soon the drought is over, yet the mood of self-sacrifice remains. Power, which had

slowly centralized on Abbenay and the PDC, has settled there. Shevek, Bedap and

others form the Syndicate of Initiative to publish otherwise censored work, and set up

a radio station with the Urrasi. With growing antagonism directed towards Shevek,

those around him are suffering the fall out – including Sadik, the child. Thus,

Takver and Shevek accept her back into their fold, aware that if those close to

them receive love from them, they must also receive pain through them.




Chapter 1 (5-24)

To continue his life work, Shevek boards a rocket to Urras, leaving his family

behind. The culture shock is significant. He is the first person from Anarres to land on

Urras in almost two hundred years, and becomes a celebrity. A room, and a job,

awaits him at the Ieu Eun University.

Chapter 3 (55-77)

Shevek is a babe in the woods. Several Urrasti Physicists meet with him, including

Saio Pae, Atro, Chifoilisk, and Oiie, who are more than a little disappointed that he

has no written notes on his theories that they believe will allow instantaneous travel.

He begins a period as a tourist – yet he is lonely, and homesick.

Chapter 5 (106-28)

Shevek begins lecturing and developing his theory. He goes shopping with Pae – an

experience that horrifies Shevek. Chifoilisk – the foreign Physicist and agent to his

government in Thu – approaches Shevek and invites him to return with him to his

homeland. Shevek declines, knowing that as much danger he is in at the University

of being co-opted, it is also where he can do the most good. He learns from Atro

the xenophobia that the Urrasi hold towards the Hainish and Terran off-world

visitors. From dinner with Oiie and his family, he discovers a redeeming quality of

the Urrasi, and a feature that the Anarresi share with them –love of family.

Chapter 7 (160-93)

Shevek receives an enigmatic message from Urrasi dissidents pleading that he

assists their like-minded cause. He meets Oiie’s sister, Vea, and they form a

friendship of sorts. But the bubble is beginning to burst for Shevek – civil war




breaks out in the nation of Benbili, and the internal-pressure is mounting on Shevek

to take a political stand. Shevek spontaneously leaves the university and travels to the

city, hoping to make contact with the underclass. However, frustrated by his

separation from the proletariat, he resorts to contacting Vea and they spend the day

and evening together. Their conversations are enlightening for both, yet at a party

hosted by Vea things begin to fall apart – Shevek gets drunk, falls into a heated

debate with some of the other guests, misreads Vea’s flirtations as an invitation (with

disastrous consequences), and throws up over the finger food.

Chapter 9 (224-53)

Shevek wakes up with an immense hang over, and deep shame, back at the

University. Pae informs him that with the government’s recent decision to become

involved in the civil war in Benbili means that Shevek’s will be restricted to the

University grounds. Shevek has a brainwave in regards to his theory, and spends the

next few days in a state of intense contemplation, followed by an epiphany that sees

his formula complete. With the help of his manservant, he escapes from the

University and heads to Old Town, where many of the politically active proletariat

is located. He writes articles in protest against the government involvement in the

civil war, and later speaks at a rally. Armed helicopters open fire on the crowd, and

there is a massacre. Shevek escapes, helping a severely wounded protestor. They

find refuge from the riot-police, who are shooting to kill, in a dusty basement. There,

the protestor eventually bleeds to death.

Chapter 11 (277-89)

Wanted by the A-Io government for his part in the workers demonstration, Shevek

finds refuge in the Terran embassy …




Chapter 13 (313-9)

… And safe passage back to Annaras on the Hainish Interstellar, Davenant. Since

his departure to Urras, the Syndicate of Initiatives has grown – but so too has the

resistance to it. This does not dissuade Ketho, the ship’s second officer, who asks to

accompany Shevek back to the planet of anarchists. Shevek accepts Ketho’s request.

Later that night Shevek stands alone in the Davenant’s gardens, twenty minutes

before he begins his descent back to Annaras. He thinks of Takver, of Saleb, of Pilun

and Bedap, and with empty hands, watches the Cetian sun rise above the ocean.




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A Jungian Reading of the Hero’s Journey

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