Chapter 1
1.2.c Archetypal Narratives, Models, Characters and Myth
Using myth and archetype to guide the development of characters and narratives aims to begin dissolving perceived barriers to scientific research and reframe it in a way which does not impose didactic demands on the audience and performers, but asks them to engage with the subject by physically experiencing it and the characters and archetypes involved.
There is already an extensive academic canon on the relationship between psychological archetypes, semiotics and narrative in myth. Liszka (1989) breaks down these narratives into the structures of 'rules', 'transgressions' and 'hierarchies'.5 Frye’s (1957) four mythoi of comedy, romance, tragedy and satire define the key elements in each genre.6 Jung’s archetypes (1980) present possibilities for characters which may be represented through science as well as art. Joseph Campbell (1978) has modelled the path of the hero in different cultural representations. Lacan’s four discourses (Everett, 2015) on the interactions between the conscious and subconscious, discuss how characters can interact with different objects, whether these be real, lost or metaphorical. An understanding of all these different interactions, alongside research into contemporary scientific research, provides a foundation for embedding, and anthropomorphising, science within a mythological narrative.
The Flowering Desert makes use of the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious and archetypes which he claims are scattered throughout mythology from across all cultures. In Jung’s text on archetypes he states that ‘[t]he archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori.’ (Jung, 1954, vol 9i:155) His forms of the archetypes can take on any content and still have a strong resonance with the psyche. Gill (2006: 53-54) writes:
While myth is the primary cultural manifestation of the collective unconscious, Jung suggests that fields affording opportunities for free expression are the next most likely outlets of archetypal activity. Dreams, religion, literature and the arts, speculative philosophy, politics, sex and romance, and even science are just some of the human activities that Jung sees as being strongly influenced by the collective unconscious: all of which, he maintains, might be better illuminated by our understanding of archetypes.
In a paper by environmentalists F. R. Westley and C. Folke (2018: online) they stated that ‘[c]ollaboration in the art-science interface undoubtedly has the potential to reveal and explore the role of symbols in unlocking dimensions and elements of the human spirit, that correspond to the dimensions and elements of the biosphere’. This argues that the iconography and symbolism of history and society can provide a channel between scientific thought and the emotional life. When discussing the work of Jung on archetype and symbol, and how to understand the existence of such unknowable things as the divine, Edward C. Whitmont (1991: 79) tells us that ‘[t]he symbol, as Jung has defined it, 'always ranks below the level of the mystery it seeks to describe. And the objective psyche in Jung’s view, is far from a product of man’s subjectivity’.7 He goes on to describe the ways that religion has been experienced through the use of symbols and is, according to Jung, imposed on our subjective psyche as archetypal forms experienced not through individual choice but as a result of the culture we live in. In particular, the relevance of different mythologies emerges and dies away in relation to the prevailing objective psyche of a particular cultural period and setting. One of our prevailing cultural frameworks since the Enlightenment has been the rational and scientific approach to the world. The commonly held view of what this means often involves: the collection of data, the understanding of the world through numbers, and the subsequent separation that that creates from the scientists and the lay person. As non-scientists are distanced from scientific research through fear of ignorance, or lack of understanding, our contemporary objective psyche may be lost in the divide.
Mixed into these discussions on how to relate to these cultural pillars of the collective unconscious is the discussion of postmodernism and the compartmentalism and fragmentation of the individual. Roesler (2008: 424) expresses the view that “[p]ostmodern epistemology declares that ‘out there’ there are no fixed and independent truths that one could describe”, and then goes on to explain the relationships between a postmodern constructivism of knowledge and identity and Jung’s theories of the self. As in the metaphor of the Sun and the Earth’s refraction I turn back to the question of whether, and how, I can know that the external reality exists beyond my perception of it, which can, in a Descartian approach, intensify the importance of the existence of the individual and the self. However, as with the metaphor of the Earth’s refraction, the lens through which I perceive does not negate the existence of the external, and the decentring of one's experiences outwards, towards the experiences of other humans and the non-human is still something that is an important aspect in cultural development (especially in a more secular society). In creating large-scale, full length works featuring artists, performers and audience, this research seeks to elevate the seemingly mundane and obsolete objects and objectified elements of our natural world, engaging with them by understanding how they can excite and ignite the minds of those who focus their energies towards them, and through a type of romantic representation, bring them to a heightened centre stage in which the audience is confronted with both the absurdity of their human narratives and a reverence for their existence. By supplying the audience and participants with an over-the-top, dramatised version of the subject I acknowledge an attempt to share in its existence, finding the ways in which our cultural histories constructively interfere with our perception of it.
Neo-realist acceptance that there may be a type of reality to objects, which we cannot perceive, is an important part of my approach to the scientific subjects. It relies on the belief that I can empirically observe and learn from my surroundings, taking me closer to a knowledge of fact and truth is a basis of scientific pursuit. I am, however, open to phenomenological approaches, as it is also apparent from our own common sense, as well as the discoveries of quantum mechanics and relativity, that as we observe we have the ability to alter the world we see in a way that is relative to the observer. Karen Barad wrote of our relationship with the world that:
phenomena - whether lizards, electrons, or humans - exist only as a result of, and as part of, the world’s ongoing intra-activity, its dynamic and contingent differentiation into specific relationalities. . . We have to meet the universe halfway, to move toward what may come to be in ways that are accountable for our part in the world’s differential becoming. All real living is meeting. And each meeting matters. (2007: 371)
As discussed above, the use of anthropomorphism can have the potential to decentre the individual and focus our minds on the possibly unknowable or ungraspable ontology of things. If one can reclaim the culture of science through artistic and expressive practices this may open up paths to be reconnected back to our inherited and ancestral transpersonal experiences of the various ways humans have described and met with nature.
When thinking about how Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious are present in our lives Gill writes that:
In other words, potentially anywhere: the principle that the archetypes inform the essential human behaviours means that virtually any part of human life or culture may become archetypal, including those not conventionally associated with myth. (2006: 53)
Here he speculates that if mythological stories are an emergent property of the collective unconscious, it is possible that the activity of myth-making could be happening in other fields far away from the theological or literary realm. As such, it is possible to draw a parallel, and an implied transpersonal experience, between the myth-making of past cultures and the search for objective truths through scientific activities today.
The act of mythologising requires an openness of imagination, similar to the kind of lateral thought enacted by scientists in their research when developing hypotheses and theories. However myth, unlike science, need not rely on empirical observations to create the base set of conditions from which to develop experiments and maths on the relationships and laws governing nature. The Egyptologist Emma Brunner-Traut suggests that:
in the myth the objects have their own inner relation to each other; they meet and interact in a world of their own, hidden and unmindful of the questioner. They are sufficient and attuned unto themselves thus constituting their own truth in the dimension of the boundless. (Brunner-Traut, 1981: 268)
The myth provides a space in which to explore a fantastical world governed and ordered by rules and relations which do not exist on Earth. It may not be right to use the process of myth making to develop scientific theories, however the form of the myth is applicable to many scientific principles, laws and constructs. Successfully weaving archetypal characters and relationships into an exposition of scientific thought and research provides a grounding in narrative, character and emotion through which to experience the science. The use of myth enables us to look into worlds beyond human anthropocentric existences. It provides an ideal backdrop through which to explore another type of living or non-living system.
Ultimately in the characters I create for stage, embedded with the meaning of the subject, I have attempted to use this integration of archetypal image to consciously realise the subject as a:
powerful impulse toward a meaningful activity or experience which has to be made real in terms of what is emotionally and ethically possible (Whitmont, 1991: 80).