SALVATION THROUGH INDIVIDUATION: A JUNGIAN INTERPRETATI ON OF LARRY DARRELL'S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY IN THE RAZOR'S EDGE

Abstract

The spiritual journey that Larry from The Razor's Edge makes after his traumatizing war experience deserves to be examined and its significance elucidated. Individuation, the central concept of Jungian psychology, offers a lens. In this interpretation, Larry's journey is understood as an individuation process whose three stages are represented by the shadow, the anima and the Self, all personified by the novel's characters. Just as individuation should be the goal of individual growth, Larry's spiritual journey exemplifies a solution to the spiritual crisis plaguing the historical background that the novel is set in.

Headnote

Abstract: The spiritual journey that Larry from The Razor's Edge makes after his traumatizing war experience deserves to be examined and its significance elucidated. Individuation, the central concept of Jungian psychology, offers a lens. In this interpretation, Larry's journey is understood as an individuation process whose three stages are represented by the shadow, the anima and the Self, all personified by the novel's characters. Just as individuation should be the goal of individual growth, Larry's spiritual journey exemplifies a solution to the spiritual crisis plaguing the historical background that the novel is set in.

Keywords: animus/ anima, archetypes, Carl Jung, individuation, shadow, the self

1. Introduction

The spiritual journey of Larry Darrell, the protagonist of William Somerset Maugham's last major novel The Razor's Edge, is the main thread of the story. It started when Larry decided to forgo a materially affluent life, after witnessing the death of a friend in the war, and culminated in Larry's finding true happiness and settling for a modest life. The meaning and significance of such a remarkable journey merits close examination. Yet due to the overwhelming preoccupation among critics with the modernist literary movement of the first half of the 20 century, The Razor's Edge, a 1944 novel - like many of Maugham's other works - has suffered critical neglect. Even its tremendous commercial success did little to salvage it from such neglect. Of the few scholars who have written on the novel, Collins, in his review of the biography Maugham by Ted Morgan, characterizes Larry's journey as a quest for "the individualist spirit in a rationalist, materialist, mechanistic age" (Collins 1982: 7) that was much called-for following the collapse of the 19th century ideals and the catastrophic First World War; Holden, in his 1994 PhD dissertation, critiques Larry's trip to India - the culminating part of his entire journey - from a post-colonial perspective; Dong and Li (2011) approaches the journey by comparing its ethics with Max Weber's theory of theodicy in politics as a vocation. Adams (2016) treats the novel, along with Maugham's other novels, like The Moon and Sixpence, as an ethical parable that reflects the individualist philosophy of the Enlightenment philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Larry's journey is seen as a path to the human heart, which, for both Spinoza and Maugham, is where human nature lies. The goal of the journey is thus to "come to understand and appreciate it" (Adams 2016: 126).

The journey is depicted by the protagonist himself as "an experience of the same order as the mystics have had all over the world through all the centuries" (Maugham 1944: 301). Well-versed and careful readers may be reminded by Larry's journey of the journeys made by Buddha, Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, etc. It thus has an archetypal nature and invites a reading through the lens of Carl Jung, whose analytical psychology is also called Archetypal Psychology. The archetypes are defined by Jung as "the introspectively recognizable form of a priori psychic orderedness" (Jung 2010: 100). On the one hand, archetypes hide in the human unconscious, and, on the other hand, they permeate myths, fairy tales, dreams, literature, art and religions. Manifestations of an archetype may vary, yet a common pattern is always present. Among the most important archetypes in Jung's teachings are the shadow and the anima/animus and the Self. These archetypes, when properly understood and integrated into the conscious, facilitate a person's individuation, by which Jung means "the process by which a person becomes a psychological 'in-dividual,' that is, a separate, indivisible unity or 'whole'" (Jung 1968: 275). It is also the "final end" of individual growth and the treatment of psychological stasis. Joseph Campbell's famous "hero's journey", a common template of heroic adventures in mythologies and literature, is a cultural rendition of the individuation process.

This essay finds that the story of Larry's spiritual quest largely unfolds in accordance with the Jungian individuation process. It will therefore dissect the individuation journey by examining the three different stages that Larry goes through, each realized through a set of archetypal experiences involving the shadow, the anima and the Self, respectively. It then elucidates the moral message of the novel, which is a call for the restoration of life's meaning through individuation. Larry's success in attaining happiness marks an encouragement to address the spiritual crises represented in the novel through a quest for meaning.

2.The integration of the shadow

The shadow is one of the most notable archetypes in Jungian psychology. At the personal level, the shadow is the dark side of the psyche that contains instinctual drives, such as one's aggressive impulses and sexual desires, which are normally unacceptable in social life and therefore repressed by the ego into the unconscious. Although we are inclined to always repress the shadow in our unconscious, that does not make us perfectly adapted members of society. We are instead liable to project our own shadow onto others. Such a projection blinds us from our own problems and inhibits our personality growth. For the individuation process to develop, the ego must "master and assimilate the shadow" (Henderson 1964: 121). The individuation process therefore entails the realization and integration of the shadow.

The shadows in Larry's individuation process, however, are not personal ones, but collective shadows, that is, the many ills of society. As the opposite of light, the collective shadows of the early 20th century Western world, where the novel is set, consist of the problems caused by scientific and technological advancement and the dark side of the explosive increase in material comforts the Western civilization achieved through industrialization. In The Razor's Edge, the shadow is represented primarily by two elements of the novel. First, it is reflected in the demonic hostility of the war revealed by the tragic death of Larry's friend Patsy, who was shot by a German plane when trying to protect Larry. This traumatizing experience propelled Larry to find out why evil exists. His struggle with evil persisted throughout his journey, until at last he came to the realization that "the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil" (Maugham 1944: 270). Although Larry did not consider this a completely satisfactory explanation, he did manage to come to terms with it: "something is inevitable[,] all you can do is to make the best of it" (Maugham 1944: 305) and decided to live "with calmness, forbearance, compassion, selflessness, and continence" (idem: 306). Such an attitude indicates his success in integrating the shadow, which, like evil, though it cannot be eradicated, can be brought to the conscious and made use of.

The second shadow that Larry tries to integrate is personified in the novel primarily by Elliott Templeton, who, although overall amiable and generous, was hopelessly snobbish and pathetically obsessed with parties and distinctions. Though an American expatriate, he exuded no authentic Americanness. Instead he spoke English with an Oxford accent and converted to Catholicism as a show of refinement and vanity. Yet "His career as a Catholic was in fact no less successful than his career as an komme du monde" (idem: 11). Elliott's vanity lasted well into his last moment, when he was still tightly holding in his hand an invitation card to an aristocratic party that he had longed to attend, but was not invited to. The invitation card was appropriated by the narrator in order to appease his anger and disappointment. The author's depiction of Larry, by comparison, shows an obvious effort to make him the opposite of Elliott. Larry gave himself to loafing and hardship in order to come to terms with evil and find the true meaning and purpose of life. His journey is highlighted by profuse reading of philosophy and psychology, hard labour in a coal mine and on a German farm, meditations and conversations in a monastery, art study, and a pilgrimage to India. Such physically and mentally strenuous undertakings are reminiscent of the Herculean "Twelve Labours", Jesus' journey in the desert or Siddhartha's ascetic wandering. These heroic adventures coincide with the inner adventures into the depths of the psyche. Whereas the shadow is epitomized by Elliott's fanatic and vain pursuit of wealth and social recognition, Larry's effort is a determined and arduous endeavour to subdue such a shadow.

3.Dealing with the animas

On the Jungian map of the soul, the layer of the unconscious that lies beneath the shadow contains the anima archetype (for a man) or the animus (for a woman). Jung writes that if the encounter with the shadow is the "apprentice-piece" (1968: 29) in a man's development, then coming to terms with the anima is the "master-piece" (ibid.). Anima and animus are Latin words for soul and spirit, respectively. The anima is composed of all the propensities in a man that are generally deemed feminine: tenderness, sentimentality and tolerance, while the animus of a woman is in charge of her rationality, aggressiveness, and tendency towards moral judgment. As anima and animus are embodiments of qualities that contradict conventional gender roles, they hide in the unconscious, but reveal themselves as a complement to the persona.

Similarly to the shadow, the anima and the animus are often projected onto the people of the opposite gender in real life. They can therefore be understood by observing one's attitude towards and behavioural patterns of people of the opposite sex. In Larry's case, there are three anima figures in his life story: Isabel, Suzanne, and Sophie. His interactions with each of them correspond to a discrete stage of his anima integration.

Jung (1969: 10) distinguishes four stages in a man's anima development and uses figures of mythology and religion - Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia - as their personifications.. Eve, the biblical mother of all humans, represents the first stage of the anima work. It is the instinctual stage of a man's attitude toward women, like that of an infant son toward his mother. The character Isabel is no doubt such a figure: originally Larry's fiancée, Isabel had to break off her engagement with him when he decided to "loaf' in Paris. She instead married Grey Maturin, Larry's best friend and a much more "this-worldly" person, who was more eager to meet the society's expectations of him. Yet Isabel's love for Larry never died - although for her, practicality always outweighs feelings. As for Isabel, the narrator observes that "I don't know what it was that gave me the feeling that in her love for him there was also something maternal" (Maugham 1944: 20). Such a feeling may perhaps be best explained by the fact that Larry's mother died in childbirth and that he was raised by males (his father, and Dr. Nelson after his father's death). Larry's early interactions with Isabel sees him without much sense of a self. As Isabel points out: "I could always do anything I wanted with him. I could turn him round my little finger. He was never a leader in the things we did. He just tagged along with the crowd" (idem: 100). For Larry to grow out of this infantile state, it was only necessary that he part ways with Isabel when she preferred a comfortable life.

The second anima figure in Larry's life is Suzanne Rouvier, a model that posed for artists and occasionally engaged in love affairs with them. Suzanne's perennial unstable life caused her to be infected with typhoid and penniless when she met Larry, who offered to take her to live with him for some time in a ramshackle inn in the countryside. The experience, which she described as "the happiest weeks I ever spent in my life" (idem: 199), restored her health and revived her spirit. Larry also left her with a large sum of money. It is quite safe to also conclude that Larry also kindled her creativity and inspired her to become a painter in her own right. Suzanne epitomizes a higher stage of Larry's anima development - the "Virgin Mary" stage, where the person in the individuation process sees the transcending values of the eros. The narrator depicts Suzanne as a woman who is "rather ugly" (idem: 185) by popular standards, but is somehow actually attractive, which, along with her honesty and down-to-earthness, is reminiscent of Mary's humanity. Her genius in art certainly suggests transcension. Suzanne's many troubled relationships with Parisian artists corresponds with Mary's early interactions with Joseph, wherein the latter sought to divorce her upon hearing of her pregnancy. Suzanne's later devotion and anticipated success as an artist, fostered through her time with Larry, resembles Mary's conception and delivery of Jesus.

The character of Sophie marks Larry's highest stage of anima development. The name of the character is obviously suggestive of Sophia, the embodiment of wisdom. An important figure in Gnosticism, Sophia represents a lost soul, oblivious of her divine nature, as one story in this tradition relates:

Sometimes she mourned and grieved,

for she was left alone in the darkness and void;

Sometimes she reached a thought of the light which had left her,

And she was cheered and laughed;

Sometimes she feared;

At other times she was perplexed and astonished! (Baring, Cashford 1991: 620)

It was Christ who awakened her from her confusion and revealed her real nature to her. The prototypical story has a parallel in Sophie's life and her relationship with Larry, who decided to marry Sophie when she indulged herself in drinking, smoking opium, and promiscuity after losing her husband and child in a motor accident. Their planned marriage failed to materialize after Sophie ran off and relapsed into the same destructive indulgences when tantalized by Isabel. Larry remembered Sophie as a "modest, high-minded, idealistic" (Maugham 1944: 215) teenager who wrote poetry in the style of Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg and would lose herself in reading John Keats. The now destitute and depraved Sophie "offers him the most spiritual temptation of becoming a saved soul" (Gaździńska 2002: 79), that is by restoring her health, rekindling her high-minded artistic pursuits, and eventually marrying her. The proposed marriage symbolizes Larry's endeavour to integrate his most developed anima, which, in Sophie's own words, is "Mary Magdalen to his Jesus Christ" (Maugham 1944: 239). Her tragic death later and the fact that her body was thrown into a river symbolizes the sacrificial act through which Larry was baptized and the completion of his integration with the anima.

4.The realization of the self

The Self in Jungian psychology can be understood in a twofold manner. First, it is the ultimate guiding force that facilitates the individuation process. Individuation thus can be understood as "the drive of the Self to conscious" (Schmidt 2015). It is a suprapersonal psychic force that organizes the entire psyche and directs the conscious ego to unite with both the personal and the collective unconscious. In dreams, mythology or literature, the wise old man that sends the hero onto his journey or mentors him along the way is a common archetype of the Self. Secondly, the Self embodies the goal and culmination of the individuation process. It is a dynamic state in which the ego is aware of the wholeness of the psyche and the individual becomes "differentiated enough to perceive our interconnection and oneness with the universe" (Colman 1999: 18).

In his spiritual quest, Larry encountered three figures that were the embodiments of "the wise old man", namely Kosti, the retired Polish army officer, Father Ensheim, the French monk, and Shri Ganesha, the Hindi yogi. Such a sequence suggests the increasing depths that Larry reached in his quest toward the Self: Kosti was a former member of the European upper-class society and instilled in Larry the knowledge of the secular aspects of Western life. And the less prominent side of Kosti's life - the fact that he was a devout Catholic - served as a harbinger to Larry's encounter with Father Ensheim. It was also Kosti that taught Larry German, which later proves to be indispensable for Larry to be able to communicate with Father Ensheim. Ensheim, the Benedictine monk, stands for the religious establishment of the Western world. When Larry spent three months with Father Ensheim in his monastery in Alsace, he found himself in a religious world well-established in its teachings, yet inadequate to address his questions concerning the existence of evil. Fortunately, this establishment was still open enough to encourage Larry to carry on his individual quest, which then landed him in Bombay, India. India was not only a geographical and spiritual "antithesis" to Larry's Western world, but can also be understood symbolically as the unconscious realm that awaited the Western man to explore and integrate. There, he was introduced to the third Self figure - Shri Ganesha, who, echoing Father Ensheim's assertion that "God will seek you out" (Maugham 1944: 280), claimed to have been expecting Larry. Larry's spiritual exploration in India, guided by the yogi, culminated in his eventual spiritual awakening. Shri Ganesha embodies the Self not just in the sense of a guiding force, but also as its culmination, which is reflected in the saintliness he exuded. To Larry, the yogi's mere "presence was a benediction" (idem: 298). Ganesha obviously epitomizes the successfully individuated self that Larry aspired to be. Larry later illustrated his spiritual journey's culmination in India, which is characterized by a rapture and heightened consciousness:

I was ravished with the beauty of the world. I'd never known such exaltation and such a transcendent joy. I had a strange sensation, a tingling that arose in my feet and traveled up to my head, and I felt as though I were suddenly released from my body and as pure spirit partook of a loveliness I had never conceived. I had a sense that a knowledge more than human possessed me, so that everything that had been confused was clear and everything that had perplexed me was explained. (idem: 300-301)

When Larry looked at the three encounters retrospectively, he was able to connect the dots and feel the guiding force that directed him to spiritual awakening all along: "Almost all the people who've had most effect on me I seem to have met by chance, yet looking back it seems as though I couldn't but have met them. It's as if they were waiting there to be called upon when I needed them" (Maugham 1944: 269). A casual reader may call such a force "fate", which Jung regards as an external manifestation of the unconscious. He (2014:71) points out that "The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate".

5.Conclusion

The Razor's Edge is set in a time when the Western world was caught in some major crises, including the loss of faith, the mass atrocity that people and nations inflicted on one another, rampant materialism and nihilism, and lack of humanity - a state that can be succinctly encapsulated in Friedrich Nietzsche's (2001: 120) ominous statement that "God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him". As the story approaches its end, the narrator tries to understate such a state and, instead, to make everybody a success, so that he could satisfy the reader's appetite for "success stories", as he concludes:

For all the persons with whom I have been concerned got what they wanted: Elliott social eminence; Isabel an assured position back by a substantial fortune in an active and cultured community; Gray a steady and lucrative job, with an office to go to from nine till six every day; Suzanne Rouvier security; Sophie death; and Larry happiness. (Maugham 1944: 343)

Yet such a happy ending still invites one to wonder why Larry was the only one that found happiness. Despite the narrator's seemingly non-discriminatory attitude towards the fates of all his characters, he undoubtedly deemed Larry's pursuit as the path to true happiness. Yet he refrains from urging all his readers to emulate Larry, partly because of how risky such an undertaking would be, as warned in the novel's epigraph: "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to Salvation is hard" (Katha-Upanishad qtd. in Maugham 1944: front cover), and partly on the grounds that he could not ascertain that everyone would find success in such a life, since he believed that "Many are called but few are chosen" (Maugham 1944: 98).

This ambivalence shows that Maugham is not completely optimistic about the feasibility of the total salvation of an entire society from its crises. However, that does not stop him from pinning his faith on Larry's individual effort and the difference he will make. As per his own plan, Larry would return to America, work first in a garage, then drive a cross-country truck, and eventually settle in New York as a taxi driver. The cosmopolitan New York here is a symbolic center of an entire "fallen" Western world. The taxi driver that Larry aspired to be is, metaphorically, a guide on people's path to spiritual awakening and meaningful lives. Larry's life plans appear to be lacking in ambition. The path he now set himself on, however, was toward the eventual salvation of society. As such, Larry is essentially a cultural hero who, after returning from a personal successful journey toward individuation, tries to remedy the one-sidedness of society by uniting the opposites (the West and the East). Joseph Campbell (1949: 296) describes the new purpose of the hero, after his return from the journey, as "serve[ing] as a human transformer of demiurgic potentials".

Sidebar

Mihaela Cozma is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the West University of Timişoara, Romania. Her areas of expertise are English morphology, applied linguistics, and translation studies. She holds a PhD in Philology from the university where she currently teaches. She has published, both in Romania and abroad, books, book chapters and numerous academic studies in her areas of research.

E-mail address: [email protected]

Xiaorui Du received his B.A. and M.A. from Guizhou University in China. He is currently a PhD student at the West University of Timiş oara, Romania. His dissertation deals with representations of the individual vis-a-vis the nation in early American literature. He is also a certified Chinese language teacher.

E-mail address: [email protected]

Sajad Ghanbari is currently a visiting professor at Ilam University, Iran. He received a Bachelor's Degree in English Language and Literature from this university and a Master's Degree in English Literature from the Islamic Azad University of Arak, Iran. He holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Tehran, Iran. His main academic interests are cultural studies, literary criticism, and American novels.

E-mail address: [email protected]

Sajad Gheytasi is an assistant professor at Paiam Nour University of Ilam, Iran. He holds a BA, an Ma, and a PhD in English Literature. He has been teaching undergraduate and graduate courses on contemporary literary theory, the American novel, and short story. His main research interests are Shakespeare studies, New Historicism, and English Poetry. He has published articles on black studies, Shakespeare, and discourse analysis.

E-mail address: [email protected]

Gabriela Glăvan is an Associate Professor at the West University in Timişoara, Faculty of Letters, History and Theology, where she teaches Comparative Literature. She is the author of a book on Romanian modernism (2014), a collection of essays on Max Blecher and a critical essay on Franz Kafka's short stories (2017). She has published numerous academic studies on modernism, the avant-garde and post-communism and is a contributor to several cultural magazines.

Email address: [email protected]

Abbas Goudarzi holds a PhD in English literature. He teaches courses of English literature at the Islamic Azad University, the Hamedan Branch, Hamedan, Iran. Interested in literary theory and criticism, poetry and fiction, he has published articles on Shakespeare's Sonnets and elements of short story and novel. He is also a professional translator of English literature into Persian and has so far translated several books, among which the more notable ones are Beowulf and Other Old English Poems, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and two novels by H. G. Wells - The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Email address: [email protected]

Jovanka Kalaba is a lecturer at the Faculty of Hotel Management and Tourism, University of Kragujevac, Serbia. She received a Bachelor's Degree in English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade, and holds an MA in American Literature and a Ph.D. in American and Serbian Literature from the same university. Her main academic interests are twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone, Serbian and comparative literature and literary translation,

E-mail address: [email protected]

Oleksandr Kapranov is an Associate Professor in English linguistics at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Haugesund/Stord, Norway. He holds a PhD from the

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