Abstract
It is time to look at a literary application of Jungian theory to a subject controversial in Jung’s personal career: the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany. In previous chapters I have argued that Roberts’ feminist fiction works with the grain of Jungian theory in developing and exploiting its poststructuralist implications. Now I want to employ an historicist approach to a text which desires Jungian ideas as a strata of unimpeachable authority, a secure meta-narrative. When a literary text’s subject is violence and fascism and is permeated by the desire for Jungian discourse as textual power, what then are the theoretical implications? What happens when Jungian theory colonises all aspects of a text which aims to account for histories and cultures?
The real danger signal is not the fiery sign that hung over Germany, but the unleashing of atomic energy… Will this knowledge inspire us to a great inner transformation of mind …?1
C.G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events, 1946
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Notes
C.G. Jung, Essays on Contemporary Events, Reflections on Nazi Germany, foreword by Andrew Samuels (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1988), pp. 89–90.
Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters (London: Martin Secker & Warburg limited, 1990), p. 288. All citations taken from the Minerva paperback edition of 1991. Further references are incorporated into the text.
Nicholas Mosley, Rules of the Game: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family (London: Secker & Warburg, 1982), Beyond the Pale: Memoirs of Sir Oswald Mosley and Family (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983). All citations are taken from the one volume paperback edition of 1992.
For an exploration and definition of ‘modernism’ see, David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977).
See John O’Brien, ‘An Interview with Nicholas Mosley’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, William Gaddis/Nicholas Mosley Number, 2, No. 2 (1982), 61.
Given the uncanny replication of the Aryan Christ motif, it is intriguing that this construction takes place at the site of a fascist opportunist erasure of difference in the Spanish civil war by the use of Moorish troops against the Republicans. The use of Moorish troops by Fascists (the so-called Christian side) is particularly ironic in the Spanish context where there is a long history of a Moorish presence in Spain with crusades by Christendom against African and Islamic states in the medieval period. See, Bernard F. Reilly, The Medieval Spains (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 51ff.
Nicholas Mosley, Efforts at Truth (London: Secker & Warburg, 1994).
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (Great Britain: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1961), using the revised Penguin Books edition of 1965.
Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, M.A.: MIT, 1993).
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© 1999 Susan Rowland
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Rowland, S. (1999). Jung, Literature and Fascism: Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley. In: C. G. Jung and Literary Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230597648_7
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