The Diamond Path : a Study of Individuation in the Works of John Keats
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.1{" \t' à .c{Ê The Diamond Path: A Study of Individuation in the Works of John Keats w Maureen B. Roberts Thesis submitted in the Department of English, University of Adelaide, for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy luly 1993 This thesis is dedicated to the memory of "one whose name was writ in water", |ohn Keats (October 31.1795 - February 231'827). m^ the depth of the deep, Down, down! Like veiled lightning asleep, Like that spark nursed in embers, The last look Love remembers, Like a diamond which shines On the dark wealth of mines, A spell is treasured but for thee alone. Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound 2.4.81.-88 Table of Contents Chapter One: THE GENERAL AND GREGARIOUS ADVANCE OF INTELLECT: ROMANTICISM AND THE ARCHETYPE L Chapter Two: ETHEREAL CHEMICALS: ALCHEMY AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION 28 Chapter Three: A SPACE OF LIFE BETWEEN: THE MYTHIC PATTERN OF END}A4ION 55 Chapter Fou¡: SPARKS OF THE DIVINITY: KEATS' GNOSTIC VISION OF SOUL-MAKING LO7 Chapter Five: A FINE EXTREME: THE APOLLONIAN.DIONYSIAN POLARITY .144 Chapter Six A DISANOINTING POISON: KEATS'HEALING DREAM OF BEAUTY 193 Chapter Seven: THE GOAL OF CONSCIOUSNESS: THE QUEST FOR UNITY 251 Notes Bibliography Abstrach Romanticism as a particular phase in the evolution of Western consciousness is characterised by a creative reconnection to the collective unconscious as a key aspect of introverted thinking. Individuation as self-realisation involves, as does the Romantic imagination, the struggle to unify recreatively through the balance and synthesis of opposites. After a brief discussion of these ideas, this thesis examines the development of Keats' poetry in terms of a basic pattern of tansformation in which an initially unified state of consciousness is divided, then re-collected as a "higher" unity through a process of maturation. Two important uniting symbols - the diamond orb inEndymion and the square edged stone at the end of The FaIl of Hyperíon - form the two ends of a thread of development along which Keats' poetry is self-creative through its healing of the "dis-ease" of inner division to reform the unified self. This quest for unity is examined through several paradigms of individuation, all of which are harmonious with the basic principles of Romanticism and |ungian thought. These are, in order, the Neoplatonic quest for the One as Truth and Beauty, the alchemical synthesis of opposites to form the Phitosophers' Stone, the Gnostic paradox of the "fortunate falI" into self-division, and the creative tension between the unified Apollonian self and the Dionysian self-divided sufferer who is in principle synonymous with Milton's Satan. Keats accordingly inverts the significance of the Miltonic Christian Fatl by ascribing a positive potential to the Dionysian transitional state of paradox. Within this perspective Keats' philosophy of "Soul-making" expresses the Gnostic striving of the divine "spark" as the latent individuality of the self to ascend through the ambivalent space of individuation to conscious realisation. Through the progressive integration of all these principles, Keats is seen to be an intuitively Gnostic and primarily introverted thinker whose quest for redeeming self-knowledge reflects his own maxim: "That which is creative must create itself." Declaration: This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any University. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously pubtished or written by another Person, except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis. I consent to this thesis being made available for photocopying and loan. Signed Acknowledgments: I would like to thank my supervisors, Michael ]. Tolley and Philip Waldron for their personal support, as well as for their advice, valuable comments, and. constructive criticism of this thesis. Also, I wish to thank Robin Eaden for her help with formatting. Abbreviations used in text and notes: L = The Letters of lohn Keats, 1.8L4-21 CW = The Collected Worlcs of C. G. lung Individual volumes in CW: PT -- Psychological Types SDP = The Structure ønd Dynamics of the Psyche ACU = The Archetypes ønd the Collectk¡e lJ.nconscíous A = Aíon PA = Psychology ønd Alchemv AS = Alchemicøl Studíes MC = Mysterium Coniunctionís SM = The Spírit in Man, Art, and Literature BL = Coleridge, Biographíø Literaríø DP = Shelley, A Defence of Poetry Chapter One: THE GENERAL AND GREGARIOUS ADVANCE OF INTELLECT: ROMANTICISM AND THE ARCHETYPE The enduring resistance of Romanticism to definitive explanations of its central essence reflects its endorsement of a principle transcendent to reason as the foundation of knowledge and being. ]ung, who once drily commented, "Thank God I am Jung, and not a fungian", displays the same reluctance to subjugate intuitive understanding to analysis and systemisation. Flere, then, is the essence of both Romanticism and |ungian psycholog/; at the heart of both is the lived dynamic of the human psyche, the transitional self moving towards a sometimes ideal, always logically elusive goal. The aim of a Jungian approach to Keats, therefore, is not exhaustively to explain, but rather to illuminate the psychological significance of that which, nonetheless, ultimately retains its inherent mystery: the person and that which expresses it, the poet and his works. ]ung's constant subjection to the reality of the psyche, the staunch refusal to privilege logical conceptualisation over the intuitive, symbolic, mythic, and metaphoric resonates with Keats' relentless immersion in the lived moment. For |ung as well as for Keats, "nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced."l I shall devote this opening chapter and much of the next to an apologetic for a holistic approach to Romanticism in which I aim to show how ]ung's basic ideas concerning the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with those of the Platonic tradition, Romanticism, alchemy and Gnosticism. The basic premise of a psychodynamic interpretative approach is that certain texts and the poefs works as a whole represent a process of development which aims to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical ideal - an ideal which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. The consequent prospective quality 2 of Romantic poetry in general entails a dialectic which moves toward a state of wholeness in which all opposites, including real and ideal, are harmoniously reconciled. This movement of becoming, in which the self is an entelechy rather than a fixed identity, reveals the creative imagination to be synonymous with an autonomous self-creation in that the imagination is the mediator of artistic and psychic balance; in the words of Keats: "That which is creative must create itself" (L 7:374, to ]. A. Hessey, 8/70/1'878). The experience of a homeostatic, self-creating self, though prevalent in Romantic poetry in general, is as integral to the life and works of Keats as it is fundamental to the |ungian psychology of individuation. Before turning to the main concern of this study - the psychology of individuation implicit in the works of Keats - it will be worthwhile, and in many respects essential as a preliminary rationale, to consider some relevant premises of Romanticism and ]ungian thought, partly in order to counterbalance certain biases which persist as unstated assumptions throughout Romantic criticism in general. It is ]ung's essentially expansionist attitude toward literature, paralleling Romanticism's inherent expansion from the personal toward the universal, that sharply marks off both from reductively personal or structural approaches and reveals certain basic intuitions to be common to both. A ]ungian perspective, in other words, is not the superimposition of an "external" critique upon literature, but rather a reaffirmation of what is explicit or implicit in Romanticism itself: the translucence of the universal in the individual, the interaction of the process of becoming with the ideal permanence of being. Jung's psychological equivalent of the universal, his hypothesis of the collective unconscious, underlies his approach to those forms of literature - of which Romanticism is exemplary - which arise from an imaginative connection to the universal psyche. Integral to the mythic consciousness prevalent in Romanticism is the collective unconscious or "objective psyche", which Jung describes as a level of psychic functioning deeper than the 3 personal unconscious, whose contents and patterns of behaviour are not personally acquired but inborn.2 In other words, the collective unconscious constitutes a universally present, suprapersonal substrate which expresses itself through consistently identifiable themes and symbols grounded in human history. The psychic basis of myth, ]ung's concept of the archetype, as an irrepresentable, formative principle of an instinctual nature, derives from his observation of the repeated occurrence world-wide throughout mythic, religious, and symbolic literature of the same patterns, images, and motifs.3 ]ung's syncretism, then, as with that of the Romantic poets, is grounded in the existence of the archetype as foundational to philosophic, religious, and artistic thought. It is from this archetypal perspective that Keats perceives how "Every department of knowledge" is "calculated towards a great whole." (L'1,:277, to ]. H. Reynolds, 3/5/181,8). A few months earlier in a letter to ). H. Reynolds, following his consideration of the collective